After a morning drizzle.

[Ronny]

Cactus with rain drops.







These pictures has been taken in the early morning when the sun started shining in my yard.
Any comments are appreciated.

[Donald]

Ronny - They look over-sharpened (frosty) to me. I wonder if you've pushed it just a bit too much in post-processing in trying to bring out the water droplets?

Otherwise I like the idea and the execution very much.

[Dave Humphries]

Hi Ronny,

You shot these at iso 400 and 500, I then guess you sharpened them at full size and uploaded them, again at fullsize to TinyPic, where they got reduced to 1599px on longest side. This has given us lots of noise when viewed at 100% in Lytebox and yet the softness too.

A better PP workflow could make these look much better (if a bit smaller) here at CiC.

After any cropping, but before any sharpening, down size each to be no more than 1000 px tall, or 1600 px wide.
Then sharpen with UnSharp Mask (USM) at say, 100% amount, 0.3 px radius and threshold of 1 or 2.
Then Save (as a different filename) as jpg at a quality of 75-80%, or 9 out of 12 and upload that to TinyPic.

If you had to crop significantly, you may need to downsize more, I rarely downsize less than 2:1, more if I can, as this helps reduce noise and effectively improves DoF/any focusing errors. In other words, if you cropped to say 3,000 px on width, downsize by 50%, or to 1500 px.

Send me a mediafire link to a RAW file of either of the first two and I'll show you what I mean.

Hope that helps,

[Dave Humphries]

e-mail received from Ronny;

I appreciate your comments, but I do not know what you mean with: Send me a mediafire link to a RAW file of either of the first two and I'll show you what I mean.

First my pictures are jpeg. I have no experience with raw.
What do you understand by mediafire link?

The picture size is originally 3888x2592 and I down size them nearly always to 1800x1200
I can send you at either size and both in jpeg only.

I try to understand what you have writtened to me, like why treshold 2 and radius 0.3

I appreciate your help

Ronny in Glendora, Ca

Hi Ronny,

I hope you don't mind me posting these questions here, it is very difficult to reply to an e-mail away from CiC when everything I need is here.

OK, let's take these one at a time ...

First my pictures are jpeg. I have no experience with raw.

Ah, OK, I was assuming you had shot these RAW, as most Canon 40D users do shoot RAW, my mistake.
It is, by far, more preferable when you need to do Post Processing (PP) to images like this and will reduce visible noise (the sharp graininess) in your pictures. It is therefore something you may wish to learn how to use in future to get better quality.

The picture size is originally 3888x2592 and I down size them nearly always to 1800x1200
I can send you at either size and both in jpeg only.

OK, so you are downsizing, but still to a size that is a bad choice for TinyPic, I would suggest you downsize from 3888x2592 to 1600 x 1066, sharpen at the settings I suggested and Upload that.

I try ~ why treshold 2 and radius 0.3

Because those values will work best!
Specifically;
the threshold of 2 is because the image may still be quite noisy, in fact if you only have a jpg original, it may need to be somewhat higher still, say 6 to avoid sharpening the noise.
the radius of 0.3 px because anything larger may show as visible halos around the edges of some drops or the highlights within the drops.

What do you understand by mediafire link?

It is a free file hosting/sharing service that is fairly simple to use (no sign up was required) and allows a large file to be deposited (by you) and you then send me (by PM, not e-mail please) the hyperlink this creates, or post it in a reply here, and I then later can collect it by clicking on that link and downloading it (as can everyone else who knows the link).

UPDATE
However, when I went to use it to try to write some instructions for you, it looked different to the last time I used it and after clicking some links I got a warning of the URL being a malicious site associated with phishing, so I guess we'd better not go there.

I think therefore the best advice I can give is for you to have a read of the tutorial here on RAW processing and start using that for better quality images. The screen shots shown are from ACR (Adobe Camera RAW) which is available in Photoshop CS, Elements and Lightroom - which PP software do you have, any of those?

Cheers,

[Ronny]

e-mail received from Ronny;

Hi Ronny,

I hope you don't mind me posting these questions here, it is very difficult to reply to an e-mail away from CiC when everything I need is here.

OK, let's take these one at a time ...

I do not mind. My digital photography world started 6 years ago at age 70.

Ah, OK, I was assuming you had shot these RAW, as most Canon 40D users do shoot RAW, my mistake.
It is, by far, more preferable when you need to do Post Processing (PP) to images like this and will reduce visible noise (the sharp graininess) in your pictures. It is therefore something you may wish to learn how to use in future to get better quality.

Most of my photography has to do with Real Estate. Agents hired me to get images to sell their homes on the net.

OK, so you are downsizing, but still to a size that is a bad choice for TinyPic, I would suggest you downsize from 3888x2592 to 1600 x 1066, sharpen at the settings I suggested and Upload that.

OK, for the forum I will downsize to 1600 x 1066. Again the Real Estate world ask me the size 1800 x 1200 to create also brochures.

Because those values will work best!
Specifically;
the threshold of 2 is because the image may still be quite noisy, in fact if you only have a jpg original, it may need to be somewhat higher still, say 6 to avoid sharpening the noise.
the radius of 0.3 px because anything larger may show as visible halos around the edges of some drops or the highlights within the drops.

Very clear. But having watched/listened to a photo elements 9 video presentaion how they used Unsharp Mask on a jpeg picture, they adviced to keep the radius always between 1 and 2 and the Threshold at 0. I have to check my original picture on the noise.

It is a free file hosting/sharing service that is fairly simple to use (no sign up was required) and allows a large file to be deposited (by you) and you then send me (by PM, not e-mail please) the hyperlink this creates, or post it in a reply here, and I then later can collect it by clicking on that link and downloading it (as can everyone else who knows the link).

I will upload the program media fire and see what I can do with it. You prefer PM. MY question: What is the difference between PM and email? What are the letters PM stands for?

UPDATE
However, when I went to use it to try to write some instructions for you, it looked different to the last time I used it and after clicking some links I got a warning of the URL being a malicious site associated with phishing, so I guess we'd better not go there.

I think therefore the best advice I can give is for you to have a read of the tutorial here on RAW processing and start using that for better quality images. The screen shots shown are from ACR (Adobe Camera RAW) which is available in Photoshop CS, Elements and Lightroom - which PP software do you have, any of those?

As I mentioned before I use Elements 9, but I will read about "raw".

Meanwhile, thank for the willingness to advise.

Cheers,

[Dave Humphries]

You prefer PM. MY question: What is the difference between PM and email? What are the letters PM stands for?

Hi Ronny,

Sorry, PM is Private Message.

You can send me one by clicking on my name on the left and selecting the Private Message link.

I read it here within CiC, it works just like a reply to a post, but is to one person, not everyone.

Regards,