Twilight, Lake Barely Sailable.

[Wild Wassa]

Twilight, Lake Barely Sailable.





Warren.

[Greg McCary]

I think you should clone the poles and building on the distant shore. You might leave the crane on the right. I kind of like it. Great work with this one. The sky looks like a biblical disaster is about to happen.
You might also level the two trees in the center as well.

[Wild Wassa]

Warren.

[Greg McCary]

Yes, that's what I had in mind. Nice edit and I really like it.

[Addies Granddaddy]

If what I see is real...............I wouldn't want to be on that lake.
This is great.
John

[Tyson L. Sparks]

Nice work, I agree, I wouldn't want to sail that lake.

[jkriminger]

very nice sky and composition. I think you should level the picture though with the shoreline, tilting right if you scroll it down to bottom of browser..slight but enough to notice with the eye.

[Wild Wassa]

Thankyou for your observations.

Addies Granddaddy, this is an actual image of a storm about to hit the dinghy race at about 7.30pm during a twilight meeting at the end of summer this year. Everything seen in the image was in the original JPEG and worked on to bring out the tones. The sails in the original photograph are very dark and not easily recognizable as sailboats.

Posting here and making the suggested changes has been an interesting excersize, in watching the technical quality of the image, the resolution, degrade. Best seen in the loss of tonality and resolution of the sail numbers on the boats.

This final posting which is actually the 5th JPEG saved from the original JPEG and posted again through the Photobucket site, has jkriminger's suggestion to straighten the horizon/waterline which although noticible was less than 1 degree out. Unfortunately the horizon has gone slightly the other way because ArcSoft only allows rotations of a 1 full degree at a minimum.

What we do is always a trade-off. Now the waterline looks more appropriate in the final shot, but as a sailor the small boats look less animated to me. Most of the boats have lost a degree of heel which was good to my eyes.





PNG would have been a better format to have saved the images? ... and I think I now know why some photographers 'directly attach' their images to their posts.

I have gained a lot from this simple posting ... much appreciated.

Warren.

[Frog]

Its a very good image and especially with the edit.
If you don't want your jpeg to degrade, don't save it as the same image.
Retitle it and you'll have two images....one edited and one original. The original will not be degraded.
Better yet shoot in raw.

[jkriminger]

as frog stated. save all your edits as a new file...work off the original and save as redo.jpg(whatever) at the highest quality. You would not want to print and possibly sell a photo with the horizon slanted. I like to use capture nx specifically to straighten my shots as all you do is drag a line on whatever is level..horizon, building roof etc. and it automatically calculates the new angle.

[Themage]

To me the image just does not do it for me, it looks too touched up for my taste.

[Wild Wassa]

Frog and jkr', thanks, I'm very basic as a digital person ... very basic but I can see real benefits in learning well.

Themage, you are absolutely right Sir (?). I couldn't agree more.

The photo was an excercise in getting to know my Arcsoft program.

This is the original image that the b/w comes from.





When I took the shot I knew there was a fleet on the water, not just a cloud and a looming storm (which we were running away from). I used this image to learn a few of ArcSoft's deep and meaningfulls called 'detail enhancements', rather than just changing the 'brightness', the 'contrast' and then hitting 'sharpen slightly', which has been my lazyboy modus operandi for the last 3 years.

Having read repeatedly on the Forum, that a RAW exposure has all the detail in it, I went looking for it in a JPEG, because I knew it should have been there ... and it is.

In a few days, I'll rework the original and try to make it into ... something worthy, not just something technically done. It was a good excercise because I had no idea of what the ArcSoft program was capable of realizing.

By-the-way ... I hate all Photoshop users who actually know what they are doing and do what they do well ... especially those who know why they are doing it well. (I hope this extreme jealousy translates, Cheers).

Warren.

[AgingEyes]

Is your posted color version the original image, the photo that your camera took before any post-processing?

If so, I think I should take a look at ArcSoft because, I would say 98% of dark areas in that image shows RGB values of 8. I doubt there're any details to recover.

[Wild Wassa]

Aging Eyes, thankyou for your interest Mate, it is appreciated.

The original JPEG image is 7,079,888 pixels.

When I reduced it to the size that you now see, it became 483,406 pixels.

... and I now see that the same image on Photobucket which is the image that we see here, and which is still the same size, is only 331,835 pixels, so I'm guessing that is where the fine detail has gone ... it has just been dumped. This is only 4.7% of the original image in relation to the original detail.

I should have called the shot, "A much reduced sized image of the original image," ... so as not to confuse readers. Sorry for that.

I wrote earlier in the thread, " ... I think I now know why some photographers 'directly attach' their images to their posts."

I think your question and my checking of the sizes has just confirmed my worst thoughts about saving as JPEGs and posting here through the Photobucket site.

Serious changes now need to happen to stop the degradation of my images ... otherwise there is no point in posting.

Warren.