This is either brilliant or horrible C&C P&TY

[JBW]

[ajohnw]

The insect is light so it might benefit from some use of the black slider to tone down the rest of the image. This would gives the subject(s) more contrast in the shot. You could also limit sharpening to brighter areas by moving the black end of the little graph to some where round the middle of the scale for mid tones. I think the halo protection has to be active for that to work. What it does is apply no sharpening at full tone levels and gradually more as the tone levels decrease. I would say the black end would need moving something like 1/3 of the way along the scale, maybe more. Depends on how dark the rest is the idea being to avoid the background from detracting from the detail in the insect. It will be pretty obvious if you use too much sharpening. Just move the amount slider along slowly from zero until it just starts to crisp up..

John
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[JBW]

Hi John, I'll give it a try.
B

[ajohnw]

Hi John, I'll give it a try.
B

It would be a good shot to play around with the curve as well. Try and find the point on the line that adjusts the brightness of the insect most. Leave a point there and add points either side and move those around to see what they do. One way of looking at what is happening is that bottom left is RGB 0 top right is RGB 255 or full house. So if you moved the centre of the line up to the top of the graph you would be moving mid tones to full house. That control is really best for things like the ants on plants shot where a dark area needs brightening a bit or more detail needs to be bought out at the dark end. Go too far though and too much contrast is lost. Sometimes that can be restored by using the contrast and brightness controls. That might make the bright end too bright / contrasty so the curve can be moved about at the top to help.

The curves contrast aspect isn't too difficult to grasp. When you open it the straight line from corner to corner is "perfect contrast". If for instance you lift up the bottom left dark end of the line the slope of the line gets less so contrast will be reduced as well. Withing limits that doesn't make much difference but more points can be added to change the slope else where. Till you get used to just using one point to lighten up a dark area a bit it's best to leave several points till later. The technique is only really any good for small changes. Google Gimp dodging burning to see how that is done locally with a "brush" - a circle whose movement follows the mouse. If you fancy a go download the GIMP. Some features in that are easy to use. Others can take a while to master.

John
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[Downrigger]

Not brilliant or horrible but I think pretty darn good. While you're at it, the whole image seems to be toppling slightly to the right, not much, maybe 10 degrees, at least to me. I wonder if the subject would hold the gaze a little better if this were "corrected", such that there would be less need for all the slider action.

[JBW]

Not brilliant or horrible but I think pretty darn good. While you're at it, the whole image seems to be toppling slightly to the right, not much, maybe 10 degrees, at least to me. I wonder if the subject would hold the gaze a little better if this were "corrected", such that there would be less need for all the slider action.

Hi mark, you are right, there is a definite rightist lean to the photo. But if you look at the largest grasshopper his left legs are not really on the grass and he is about to swing to the left to get away from me. The trailing grasshopper is also looking around some grass and her head is tilted. Same deal with the smallest grasshopper in the top right corner.

It could be straightened up but then it would be an entirely different feeling?

[Downrigger]

It could be straightened up but then it would be an entirely different feeling?

Maybe Brian... interesting if such a relative small change seemed to matter a lot, either way you'd get the sharp image with strong diagonals all about - what makes it such a nice image.