These are great as well - more atmosphere and action, and you appear to have been the invisible man

They seem to be slightly sharper than the previous set?

Congrats on a great year of photography David, a diverse one as well, and its only the start of 2014 - with the K3 at the ready!

All fabulous, but the butterfly is very special.

The way you have processed that last one again is not quite how I suggested - I agree that the dark mids and shadows give it that atmosphere, so I wanted to keep them. Can you try pulling up just the whitepoint and then re-correct the mid slider back to where it was, and finally pull the blacks back down again - this should stretch the DR giving better highlights but without losing the 'integrity' of your original intention.

Thanks Will, it seems I'm wrong about the exposure then! Actually, I'm intensly relaxed about being wrong It often leads to better quality discussion and draws out more information .. thats what its all about for me

The histogram you show does reveal a problem for sure - of course, not every scene will have a full range of tones, although for reproduction it may be desirable to try and achieve something close to this.

I'm usually complaining about people not keeping a grip on their blown whitepoints, but in this example here that is hardly a problem. A bit of upper expansion would work I think - for example, the very brightest parts of the sky where the clouds thin a bit were obviously not grey midtones in real life - so yes, you could pull the whitepoint up quite a bit, perhaps I'd take it a quarter of the way across from the right edge - this may positively affect bits of the foreground as well, giving brigher refections on the water for example.

But I'd keep the mids and shadows fairly anchored, as that is needed to keep the moode and atmosphere that is being displayed here.

Its no problem - resolution clearly is not the issue. For photobook-sized prints there's not a significant difference between 300 & 240 ppi really, certainly not enough to cause the big problems you've been seeing.

PPI vs DPI ? This is a never-ending question, and has been thrashed out many times before, so do a search on the forum for more info - there's others here with much more knowledge of it, but I'll give you the basics here for now ... they are not the same. PPI is 'pixels per inch' and is the density of image pixels in a photo file. Different cameras output files with different densities, and it is not really that important at point of capture.

The most significant thing for capture files (the settings you make on the camera ) are image size and quality. So for best quality you set the largest image size available - this is shown in 'megapixel' units - so you choose the highest available ... this is the photo dimensions multiplied - your figures above suggest you're shooting at 19.5 megapixels sounds plenty enough!

Next is trhe 'quality setting', only relevant to JPEGs - this controls the amount of JPEG compression. Again, just go for the maximum, called Premium on Pentax.

'DPI' is Dots per Inch and refers to a printing machine resolution onto the paper - this is individual really, optimised to the machine and paper, so only significant if you are operating a printer.

Anyway, for RAW you're getting the maximum size and quality automatically. The ppi setting you make for printed output has been debated here many times. My own position differs from that of , for example, our main mod John Riley - but then we use different printintgprocesses. My view, for online printing services, is that you just send the service a full-sized maximum quality JPEG and don't worry about the resolution - any file that is in the region of 8-16 mb will be plenty for most common sizes, and (as I have found) if needed the services dedicated resizing software will interpolate and otherwise re-jig you file to optimise it for the chosen output size - all under the supervision of a professional & experienced operator.

John has argued that it is always better for the photographer to carry out their own resizing operations to optimise their shots to the requirements of the printing service. I accept this approach in cases of commercial work or where you are dealing one-to-one with the printing personal, but at the same time I question whether Photoshop on a home computer is necessarily an 'optimum' solution for this type of thing, especially if the file is being 'upscaled' - ie made bigger.

Anyway - I ramble! To be honest, in your case here, you say the only place that photos look wrong is in the Cewe photobook software ... the dimensions, resolution and compression quality all seems fine ... so logic suggests it must be the Cewe software at fault, not your photos.

I also see no reason to pay for prints to be made when they don't look any good on the screen - if they look rubbish in the photobook software then they will probably look the same when printed! If Cewe themselves can't resolve it, I advise you to keep hold of your money and prepare a photobook using another service.

No, thats wrong, it was definitely pre-flash - what I was experiencing occurred even when the camera had been off. I was using manual 'catch-in-focus', and as I turned the focus ring, when the centre red point illuminated there was a slight electrical sound and the pre-flash fired, but the viewfinder remained open, then the delay as I said before the flash fired and the shot was taken.

Not sure if this is correct behavior, but I am guessing it was caused by the unusual bouncing arrangement.

From the figures you give there they would appear to be basically full-sized images, although I would advise to save at maximum, 12 - there's really no reason to carry out more compression on those JPEGs - uploading files of 10-15mb on broadband is not an issue really.

One last figure to check, which is the resolution - a figure expressed as 'ppi'. This would normally be something like 72 or 96 or 300. It will be in the file properties (right-click) under the details tab. With the file sizes you have given you clearly have plenty of resolution though, so I can't see this could be the problem.

So - Cewe say the files are fine - so are they saying they can print the book OK with them? If thats the case, where is the problem occuring - where are you seeing these bad quality images exactly?

That is really the way that the Adobe workflow is constructed - in answer to the OPs question above, the RAW converter is mainly concerned with carrying out the 'conversion' of the file into a pixel-based image file - the most common are JPEG / TIFF / BMP. But the RAW converters allow you to perform key adjustments before conversion, such as exposure, white balance, shadow increase, highlight reduction, saturation / vibrance, sharpness etc etc.

This is a good thing, because in most situations performing these adjustments directly to the RAW file before conversion will provide the highest possible quality, more so than performing similar adjustments in a 'pixel image editor' (like Photoshop).

Some converters are more sophisticated then others - the ACR 'plug-in' for PS & PS Elements is designed as a 'front'end' RAW converter, not as a fully featured image editor. The intention is that you carry out the key image adjustments in ACR and then 'open' the newly adjusted file into the main programme - this will then reflect all the changes you made in ACR, and you then go on to do other things if needed in the main editor, eg using layers or other features not available in ACR.

When its finished then you 'save as' and all the changes up to now are written into a new pixel image file which you choose - JPEG or TIFF woud be the main two options, and you choose the quality needed. These days with storage not a major issue it makes sense to always save JPEGs at maximum if they are to be your main version of the shot or for printing. Or a TIFF (choosing non-compressed) for a 'master' version to be archived and maybe worked on again if you think you may want to - this is good because the non-compressed TIFF will not lose any quality as a result of being saved and you will not lose quality furthing along if yuou edit it further and save it again.

If you're using a flashgun try bouncing it upwards and sideways - this will lengthen the time between the preflash & main flash and might affect the blinking a bit.

I was amazed recently using a new device with the camera pop-up flash - its a silver panel that attaches to the hotshoe with the flash head raised, angled upwards at about 40 deg it bounces the light upwards but allowing some catchlight forwards through some slats. Its very effective actually, but you need to work in full manual I find - anyway, it massively increased the time between pre-flash and main flash in certain dimmer lighting, nearly half a second for some shots!