Autumn Color - Upstate New York

[Joiemagic]

This is a vertical panoramic photo, made with 11 photos. Upstate New York, near West Point.

Feel free to comment...

[Dave Humphries]

Hi Joie,

I hope this doesn't come across too negative - you haven't done yourself several favors with how we view this image here, but on the bright side; there's potential to learn, which is what we're all here for.

I'll start with the picture;
Processing-wise; for me, too much saturation and not quite enough shadow detail, but others may disagree.

The sky is blown, but on this kind of shot, unless you get 'clear blue', that's almost inevitable, so not much you can do. As there's no shooting info in the EXIF data, I can't say much more - probably due to the nature of its construction (11 shot pano), I would be interested to know the focal length and camera settings used.

I see what could be wind blur on some leaves and not others, but I am guessing this was induced by the pano software trying to make sense of an incredibly busy set of pixels, with the same thing viewed from slightly different angles and/or with movement due to wind, between exposures. Due to this last point, in hindsight, this doesn't seem to be a subject suited to the panorama treatment - was there a reason, beyond experimenting, to attempt it; compared to say, a standard shot with a wide angle lens?

Now to sharpness; this should be 'cracking', but it isn't - what went wrong?

I don't know if you did a downsize sharpen, I am suspecting not, but I may be wrong and here's why;

The EXIF data shows the shot was 1643px High by 1228px Wide.
When you uploaded to TinyPic, this was above their "1600px on longest side" rule, so they automatically downsized it a bit to 1599 H x 1195 W, this will have softened it.

Further, when displayed in the thread, it is again auto resized in the browser, to 700 H x 523 W, but this isn't too much of a problem on this example.

The problem is that when someone clicks the image to see it bigger in the Lytebox, as their screen won't be anything like 1599px tall, they will again see a scaled version, with sub optimal sharpness

Even if they right click and open the image in a new tab or window, then click on it again to see it at 100% and pan up and down it, it still isn't sharp, probably because of the TinyPic resize and possibly because it wasn't sharpened it after downsizing (from probably 15,000+ px height).

The key thing to take away from all this is to consider how your audience can view your images and basically, they are unlikely to be able to see anything more than 1000px tall at 1:1 - and if they don't view at 1:1, they'll never see it as sharp as you did when you produced it.
Most LCD screens these days are 1050, 1080 or 1200 px tall and you need to leave a bit of room around that, hence my recommendation of 1000px maximum height for any image, no matter what the aspect ratio.

I'm sure you still have the master (big) file;
Try downsizing to 1000px H x 747 px W using normal bicubic (not bi-cubic sharper)
Then apply UnSharp Mask (USM) at 90% amount, 0.3px radius and 0 threshold
Save as a jpg at a quality of 9/12 or 75%
Upload that to TinyPic
Post it here.

It'll be interesting to see how it looks/compares.

I do like the composition though and one benefit of it being a pano is a lack of Chromatic Abberation (CA) which, with that sky brightness and trees, would most likely have spoiled a traditional wide angle shot.

I do hope that is helpful,

[Joiemagic]

Thanks Dave, I'll have to get back to you when I get a chance to do those suggestions. As a note... it was just to experiment with the idea of doing a pano. I do have a few single shots that come close to matching this shot as a whole... As I was shooting those, I had the thought of a pano... Did two columns of five portrait oriented rows, plus an extra in there somewhere...