my gallery please comment

[noblerot]

i am 3 mths old into photography and in my gallery you could see some of my works, i personally find that the colour of my images are not as vibrant and crisp, there is obviously something i missed which i cant put my finger on, could someone please help.

i know nothing about jargons like colour management...colour space...calibration...profile and i suspect these are needed to optimise the picture quality ?? ( i would like help to establish the right setting for my S2 pro )


http://www.pbase.com/noblerot

thank you.

[raidertek]

I am not sure that I see that anything is missing! These are great images!

[noblerot]

tks for your compliment :)

i try and pull out one of the photographers site to compare, i see a vast difference in quality, do you ?

http://megaweb.clubsnap.org/

http://www.pbase.com/pixelmaid/things

and of cos those in getty, they are unbeatable....

[noblerot]

http://www.pbase.com/image/18863184

this is my friend's work, is superb !my just dont have the crispness :(
and i dont know why

[raidertek]

With all that I have learned RE: Digital They tell me that its all in the sharpening of the file.

[noblerot]

you mean photoshop unsharp ??

[raidertek]

yes

[SwitchBL8]

Here's the lily after a quick-and-dirty Auto-levels and some Unsharp-Mask (200/1.5/0).

http://www.pbase.com/image/20054825

Looks much better to me. The image did not provide any EXIF information, so I could not compare it to the shot your friend took.

Cheers!
Reginald

[Swampy]

here's an example. I took a crop of a picture and resized to 800x600 in photoshop. Saved the output to the top picture. Then I took the same crop, did removed some red hue, did USM of Amount: 49%, Radius: .7 and Threshold: 1. Resized the picture to 800x600, then did the same USM 3 times to come up with the image at the bottom.

Granted I don't have to do this with all my pictures, but you'll find yourself using USM quite a lot to get those really crisp pictures.

[mmaathuis]

I found all this about the Un-Sharpen Mask really interesting.

I tried it a couple of times and didn't like it but after reading about it in this tread I ended up unsharping pictures for hours now.

Does anyone know a good site with tutorials or guidelines about the USM? I've just been fooling around and want to know more about it. Like, why is it called Unsharpen when it seems to be doing the opposite?

[raidertek]

Originally posted by mmaathuis
I found all this about the Un-Sharpen Mask really interesting.

I tried it a couple of times and didn't like it but after reading about it in this tread I ended up unsharping pictures for hours now.

Does anyone know a good site with tutorials or guidelines about the USM? I've just been fooling around and want to know more about it. Like, why is it called Unsharpen when it seems to be doing the opposite?

I will second that request

[Swampy]

I actually found something here 6 months ago or so. Someone posted a nice link to someone elses website that explained in detail on the USM. I can't find it here again though of course.

Hopefully someone will know I'm talking about and know where it is and re-post it.

[KeithM]

Try reading:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/digitalphotography/learnmore/fixit/sharpening.asp

I tend to not use in-camera sharpening so use USM twice. I've found that to get an image to print well, it will look a bit rubbish on screen.

I also resize my images to print at the desired physical size at 300dpi which means I can alsways use the same(ish) numbers !

Keith.

[Swampy]

That site explains it just as well as the other one that I was looking at previously.

[Tom V]

Unsharp masking comes from "old fashioned" traditional film work in the darkroom used by commercial printers. I studied this a little back in college when we made 4-color separations by hand using filters, point light sources, Kodalith high contrast film, bump and flash exposures, and room sized copy cameras.

It involved a complicated series of contact film copies, using blank sheets of film between matching positives and negatives of the same image. The resulting UNSHARP MASK had a soft image of just the areas with detail (usually, just the edges of objects or textures). This unsharp mask was then combined with an ..... gosh it gets confusing! It took lots of film, and copies of this and that, and could be combined with image-forming and non-image forming double exposures. There were a few ways to do it, given all the variables.

The unsharp mask allows the darkroom technican to increase the contrast around detail in the original negative, giving the appearance of more sharpness.

No detail can actually be gained by doing this (traditionally or in Photoshop), but it can give the appearance of more detail by increasing the contrast around differences in brightness in the image.

With Photoshop, you can easily control the amount of contrast increase, the area in which the contrast is extended around the detail, and the threshold of original pixel contrast on which Photoshop will work.

[Andre]

The Microsoft article says "compensate for the blurring effect of the low-pass filter". Can someone explain why digital cameras have to have this filter, and what is its purpose? (Does removing it help?)
Thanks

[Swampy]

The article kinda explains that that filter is needed. Quoted from that article: "Detail blurred by the low-pass filter. Virtually all digital cameras, from SLR to point-and-shoot, contain an optical filter in front of the image sensor. Called a low-pass filter, it improves image quality in several important ways, but in the process blurs image detail slightly. This softness can, and should, be compensated for. "

[noblerot]

million tks people, i really appreciate your invaluable tips

reginald, tks for your effort in improving my lily, it sure looks alot better now than the previous soft look. :)


does anyone know how to achieve the below image ? :)

http://creative.gettyimages.com/source/search/resultsmain.asp?txtSearch=night&source=quickSearch&brand=tib&UQR=ieeaom

my guess is double exposure : -

1) first exposure background ??
2) second exposure - play with focal... blackout background, slower shutter...lady move forward to create abit of the ghost effect ???

cheers

[noblerot]

sorry...the earlier link leads to getty site and not the individual image

here's the attachment

[Swampy]

Not a double exposure. Photo editing for sure, but not double exposure.

She couldn't have been "moving" to get that effect. Her face would have been blurred as well....

Someone just posted a picture with some band guys in it that moved, that's what you'd end up with...

[Swampy]

Back on the subject of USM real quick. Something that the article on Microsoft's website above that was left out...

The other article I read, besides just doing the USM, said to convert the image to "Lab color" (in Photoshop), then under the channels tab. select lightness (will display your image in B&W), then do the USM, then convert back to your other image mode.

I find this to be true and can see a slight difference in my images when I do it this way. For "everyday" images, I probably wouldn't do it, but serious stuff, I always do it this way. When doing USM to web images, the conversion to and from Lab Color only takes a 1/2 second anyway, so why not?

[mmaathuis]

Thanx all of you for your info on the USM. The article as all your comments where very helpfull!