#10

Hi, Colonial Coz. Egregious? I'll have you know that my pixel-peeping is of the highest order .

OK - perhaps "upper half" would have been more to the point and less ambiguous .

Of course your example would have to be a one-in-a-million exception - when is the upper half not the upper half......

I hadn't even thought about iris brightening, never mind considered its relationship to catchlights. The two together add depth and life to the windows of the soul.

My own observation is that multiple catchlights never look right, and if there are multiple catchlights I'll reduce them to one, or perhaps one main one plus a smaller secondary one. I also think that the most appropriate catchlights are those in the northern hemisphere.

His clothing looks purposeful, his walk and gaze look purposeful. Even his all-weather protection looks purposeful. I just wish there was a little bit more room in front of him to give him some space to purposefully move towards. By crowding him with the left hand edge of the frame, it's as if you're suggesting that where he's heading isn't significant.

With all that purposefulness in the scene, my guess is that it has a dynamic that appeals to you and that's why you like it.

Much better. Zooming in on the trees, it looks like you had some sort of masking turned on when you selected the trees, and the resulting selection is a bit patchy. If I was doing that with the Adjustments brush I'd have the auto-masking turned on to select the edges of the area, then once I'd done that I'd reduce the brush size and turn off the auto-masking to get the bits that had been missed due to the auto-masking. I'm not sure how much of that applies here, but for some reason there are patches of the trees that have been excluded from some of the adjustments. It's not noticeable till you zoom in, so maybe you're happy with it. And I think I'd have tried to make the sharpening a bit more edge-oriented. But the overall look is cleaner and the reflections look a bit more glossy ( selectively applied Clarity? ).

The story-telling's clear enough and the atmosphere is well-captured. Are sunrises really as red/orange as that where you are? I would expect a sunrise to be more yellow. Sunsets, on the other hand.....

The algorithms use interpolation to generate values for virtual pixels that lie in between the pixels provided by the sensor. That way the image resolution can be changed to values which are not exact multiples of the original resolution, and the resolution can be not just decreased, but also increased (up to a point - the quality of up-sized images depends on the sophistication of the algorithms).

In theory, any value of resolution (up to a point) can be achieved, but the algorithms will produce preferred values which depend on what the starting point was and what the desired file size upper limit is. So if you stipulate a maximum file size of 2MB, the actual file size may come out at something like 1.85MB.

To do all of the above, the starting point will be to use all of the data provided by the sensor. The more data the sensor provides, the better a job the algorithms will do of up-sizing or down-sizing.

Are you confusing megapixels (MP) with megabytes (MB)? The usual way to downsize a JPG image is to state the maximum number of megabytes (in other words the upper limit). When you do that in, say, the export section of a PP editor, the algorithms do all the required condensing. I believe that for Facebook (and quite a few other online forums), the preferred size is less than 2MB.

Alternatively, as rgrenader pointed out, you can specify the number of pixels on the bottom edge (i.e. the width). For example, if you want to upload an image to UHH which is already at the thumbnail size (so that UHH doesn't have to do anything to the image), you specify a width of 600 pixels.

http://www.uglyhedgehog.com/t-164200-1.html

A smaller aperture would have helped, but I think the real problem is your focus point is too far away, considering how close the foreground rocks are. Since the foreground rocks are very close, you probably needed a focus point closer than the hyperfocal distance.

To the uninformed viewer, the clouds are just one element in a somewhat busy scene. It would be hard to come up with a way of editing the shot to make it obvious that the clouds are the intended main subject. Your choice of title draws attention to the reflections, and the clouds are only partly reflected in the lake. A more complete reflection might have helped, but I suspect that the shooting options may have been subjected to height restrictions .

Since the clouds were the intended main subject, the darkness of the rest of the shot works towards that objective, but we're more used to seeing well-lit scenes where the foreground and mid-ground are the usual focus of interest. Your shot does capture the time of day quite well, so you've achieved your objectives on several fronts. I'll repeat an oft-mentioned comment that seems to apply here - if you like it, that's what matters.

Thanks for commenting, Mark. I fully agree that overcast skies are a long way from being ideal for landscape shots. However, overcast skies are a common reality for many of us, and I think it would be wrong to eliminate them completely from the mix. You could say much the same thing about thick mist shots. I don't intend to make a recurring theme of overcast skies, but they have their place.

In addition, the series is entitled "A Sense of Place", and overcast skies are such a common feature of this part of the country (especially up in the hills), it would be a mis-representation to exclude them altogether. I could also mention I'm forever being told that this sort of weather is what's expected when viewing Scottish landscapes.

It's not against the rules, but it's considered good form to seek the OP's permission first, unless they've already stated that it's OK. The same thing applies to posting edits of the original shot, perhaps with more of an emphasis on not doing it without the OP's permission.

If they re-named it Total Confusion I wouldn't argue with that .

Hi, Neil. I hope the beating over the head isn't hurting too much. If it gets too much, a couple of Tylenols might help .

What you should be asking yourself is "Did circumstances provide me with ideal shooting conditions?" If the answer's "No", you're perfectly at liberty to use PP to push the capture in that direction. I'm not suggesting that you try to eliminate all dark areas from the shot, but the fact is if the dark, impenetrable areas are too large or too numerous, it doesn't look good. Up to a point they can serve a very useful purpose, but beyond that they become lost areas, because no detail = no interest. Most of the time you don't want areas like that predominating in the shot. In this particular case it would be nice if there was enough detail to be able to tell where the trees end and where the reflections begin.

Another point is that you shouldn't use the sensor to gauge what should be there and what shouldn't. Typically your eye will see into shadows better than the camera's sensor, and much of the time your eye will be doing that without you being aware of it. If there's a bright sky or bright clouds in the frame, the camera will ramp down the exposure, whereas your eye can concentrate your attention on the dark areas and compensate for the gloom, allowing you to see details that would be lost to the camera.

Does your sharpening tool have Masking or a Details slider? If there's any tendency towards graininess or noise in a shot, you want to avoid applying sharpening to the fine details. Most of the time the important thing is to sharpen the main edges, and if the finer detail isn't getting much in the way of sharpening, the difference that the loss of sharpness makes to the overall impression of sharpness is marginal. And it'll be preferable to having grain/noise made worse by the sharpening (yuk! ).

Another thing you can do with grainy/noisy shots is to add de-noise but keep the Details slider quite high so that the softening effect is minimised and affects mainly the finer details (i.e. the grain/noise).