Dawn at my campus

[Yan Zhang]

Having got my new 5D Mark II for less than 2 weeks, I only got the second chance to get up early this morning and went to the hill of my campus. There was some mist in the early morning down the hill. The sun was behind the cloud and presented a nice color.

I shot in raw.

Comments are welcome. Thanks.

[crisscross]

very handy having this viewpoint at your finger-tips (though looks as if you are going to have to hone your stamp/clone skills for that power line)

Nice shot and colours and like the shadings in the clouds and recession of trees. For my taste increasing saturation and contrast a few percent improves it (and a bit more work removing the pylons; I wonder if there was more of the furthest line of trees before starting on the cables?)

[CNelson]

Nice image...I like the soft colors and mist. I recently acquired the 5D MK II and I really like it.

Chuck

[Yan Zhang]

very handy having this viewpoint at your finger-tips (though looks as if you are going to have to hone your stamp/clone skills for that power line)

Nice shot and colours and like the shadings in the clouds and recession of trees. For my taste increasing saturation and contrast a few percent improves it (and a bit more work removing the pylons; I wonder if there was more of the furthest line of trees before starting on the cables?)

Thanks for your comments and suggestion. I didn't do any adjustment except a bit crop for the original picture. Here is the one I increased about 10% saturation and a bit more contrast.

[Yan Zhang]

Nice image...I like the soft colors and mist. I recently acquired the 5D MK II and I really like it.

Chuck

Chuck,

Thanks. I think 5D Mark II is a very powerful camera. I have tried to do a large crop, and the remaining part is still very good when viewing it as 100%. High resolution is nice. I also tried its movie function, the effect is wonderful.

[crisscross]

I didn't spot it at first, but this is a very highly compressed file and therefore adjustments are not having a great effect - suggest extracting jpgs at 1000x750 pixels and file size around 200-300kb to do justice to your pics

If you have difficulty controlling that, say what software you are using and someone will put you right

[Yan Zhang]

I didn't spot it at first, but this is a very highly compressed file and therefore adjustments are not having a great effect - suggest extracting jpgs at 1000x750 pixels and file size around 200-300kb to do justice to your pics

If you have difficulty controlling that, say what software you are using and someone will put you right

Dear Chuck,

Thanks for your help. I now use Photoshop CS4. What I did was:
(1) opened the raw in ACR 5.3
(2) load the image into Photoshop
(3) do adjustment there
(4) save it as a psd file (16-bit), and also save it as
a jpeg file with quality of 10 or 12 (depends).

Next time, if I want to do further adjustment, I then open the psd file
in Photoshop CS4, and do adjustment there again. The 2nd image I posted
above was produced by opening the saved psd file, and repeat (3) and (4) above.

Is this a reasonable workflow?

Yan

[Dave Humphries]

Hi Yan,

I am no expert, so I won't suggest the right way, but two things I would say are;

1) Would suggest doing at least some of the 'whole picture' workflow in ACR5.3, it will be remembered the next time you open the RAW file, saving doing it over again. This is no good for any cloning or layers work of course, for that saving in 16 bit psd sounds good to me. I think the idea is to save the psd at capture resolution, before you do any final sharpening. When you want to produce a jpg, re-open psd (if not still open), downsize for web (or not for print), then do a final sharpen to taste and save that as the jpg at say Q10.

2) Can you actually spot a difference between jpg qualities of 10 and 12 (apart from filesize)?
I have tried and failed, received wisdom on the internet also suggested to 9 or 10 being all anyone would ever need.

Nice light in the picture, those conditions don't occur very often, well caught.

Cheers,

[crisscross]

Yan

the files are 25-30kb as far as I can see, do check Dave or sombody, but this does not seem to be consistent with quality 10. Something seems to be going wrong somewhere; it could alternatively be that they are being further reduced/compressed at the site of 1st posting and what is being transferred here is a 'small' version of the image.

[Dave Humphries]

~ this does not seem to be consistent with quality 10. Something seems to be going wrong somewhere; it could alternatively be that they are being further reduced/compressed at the site of 1st posting and what is being transferred here is a 'small' version of the image.

Yan,

I agree with Chris, I couldn't determine from the image location where/who you are hosting them with, that knowledge may help someone here work out where it's going wrong.

What size (pixel width x height) did you upload, was it the 720 x 480 we now see? I suspect not.

Cheers,

[Yan Zhang]

Dave and Chris,

Thanks very much for your help.

The file actually is hosted by picasaweb, I submitted jpeg file with a size of 7.6MB (Q12) but
it was automatically downsized largely by picasaweb.

I am not sure if there is a better way to handle this except I directly attach the file with my post.

I sometimes save jpeg of Q10, sometimes of Q12, except the file size, I cannot see any quality difference from screen. For my this image, I found Q10 is about 5 MB, and Q12 is 7.6 MB. Size is the only issue I considered here.

[Davey]

there is always png, sometimes you will get a similar sized file to compressed jpeg but without the artifacts. You might need to tweak it though to get it down. Png is lossless by the way and if you save regular way as png in ps it will be quite big compared to png saved via "save for web". The save for web route drops colours and some info to shrink size but can sometimes result in higher quality image compared to jpg at same file size.

The question is do picassa resize due to file size or image resolution specs? If it's the latter then I'd recommend you shrink it yourself (since you can control reduction algorithm such as bicubic sharp when going smaller and add pre/post shrink sharpening as appropriate to keep it looking nice. Hope this helps.

[crisscross]

Dave and Chris,

Thanks very much for your help.

The file actually is hosted by picasaweb, I submitted jpeg file with a size of 7.6MB (Q12) but
it was automatically downsized largely by picasaweb.

I am not sure if there is a better way to handle this except I directly attach the file with my post.

Yan: it sounds as if you need to distinguish between the files you are going to keep for your own archive + printing and those destined for web forums.

I will leave the CS crew to tell you what to do for the former (a non issue for me as Nikon nef files do the lot in 1)

For the web it is best to (a) rescale down to either 1024x768 (seems to be a common limit for electronic display) or maybe 1200x800 as our monitors are becoming better (b) then 'save as' using quality 8-10. That gets you a file of around 300kb, but file size varies according to content. For eg a bird with only blue sky for background it might come to less than 100kb. For, typically, landscapes with a lot of trees in leaf you may have to reduce to quality 7 or 8 for forums with a 300kb file limit, or stick to Q9/10 and get 400-500kb file.

That transfers all that can be seen on screen and saves you a lot of upload time, but you need the 'archive' file for prints over about 7x5".

You may see little difference in quality on a particular computer+monitor set up between a 7MB file and your 30kb ones posted, but that suggests its a poor quailty monitor without any colour/calibration. But if you find it helpful for us lot to guide you on PP improvements, we need at least the 300kb file to work at. I sometimes put up my nef(RAW) file on my own site for people to play with so as to include the all-important first stages of getting the best out of the RAW file

[Dave Humphries]

Hi Yan,

Thanks Davey, I didn't know some of that about png from PS.

I agree with Davey you're maybe better downsizing the pixels yourself (Image > Resize > Image Size) for the web, it would allow you more control and be able to apply appropriate sharpening for that size - remember to save as a different filename though.
However, using Picasaweb, that's not the end of it...

I think Picasa web will accept upto 1600 x 1200 if uploaded from Picasa 3 itself. The 720 width pic you see is the max they display when you open a single image of an album.

Here is an example from my Picasaweb:
The default single picture view of 720 x 499
The file submitted was downsized by Picasa 2 to 1600 x 1110, which you can see by clicking the magnifying glass top right.
The further down size and saving of the smaller image is beyond your control and very likely at a quality of about 3, not 10 or 12.
You can see this difference in the image (as distinct from page) URL by the addition of "/s720/" in the path.

Hope that helps explain weird things, although I doubt even this is the full/accurate story, I didn't know half this before I started experimenting with links for this reply!

What this means is you can't really successfully use Picasa web for inline images here, indeed, that's why I went to PBase a few weeks ago myself (and paid the $23/yr for direct linking, it's not perfect, but much better).
At PBase, you still upload one image and it creates upto 3 more sizes from it (at a higher jpg quality than 3, I think), but with direct linking enabled with the paid for account, you get back control over what gets put inline here. So if you want an optimised pic and sharpening for here, upload at a width of 680px for no resizing by CiC, or if you don't mind that, then say, no more than 1024 or 1200. This agrees with what Chris just posted

Hope I explained that ok,

[Yan Zhang]

Dear Davey, Chuck and Dave,

Thanks very much for your help and information. I'll try to absorb all this knowledge
and do some experiments, to work out a better way for posting images. At the same time, I think I may also simply attach my original image with the post for people's comments.

Thanks again.