Inquisitiveness

[The amateur]

Visiting a small castle in France last September 2023

[Chataignier]

Interesting shot Antonio, the posture of the woman reflects that of the statue : head slightly tilted. The space between the two is perhaps a bit of a problem, they compete for attention. If they had been closer together they would have appeared more as one subject.

[DanK]

I like this. I think I see what David is responding to, but I think the issue isn't so much distance as the very bright area between the person and the sculpture.

I wonder whether it would help to adjust the tonality. I did a VERY quick and dirty edit to explore this. I darkened the background and dodged (lightened) the face of statue, both with a luminosity blend because that darkening exaggerated the color of the wall. I added some contrast to the face of the statue. It's a very crude edit, but it might be enough to see whether this is a direction worth pursuing.

[The amateur]

@ David
Thank you for your very interesting contribution.
I'm sorry David, but I don't agree with you because I believe that the attitude of the person who is attentively observing the statue with a certain curiosity, somehow brings the person and the statue closer together, making the proximity of these two elements somewhat irrelevant.

In any case, thank you once again for your observation. It is always useful to receive inputs from other people who are involved in the field of photography.
Bonne année !
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@Dan,

Thank you very much Dan for another excellent observation about the photograph I posted.

Dan, I also agree with you, but I'm not entirely in agreement.

In any case, thank you very much for the excellent and quick work you did, which is always interesting but, on the one hand, the central area of the image was too bright and you darkened it a little, now the left side of the image is too strong and it would also need an adjustment.

Although the result of your work, even a little quick, resulted in a slightly more captivating image, I don't know if the original RAW file would support this type of treatment, since it was captured by a very good quality machine (of course ), but limited in terms of dimensions.

But on the other hand, this is an image that when printed will not exceed A5, which I have already done to send to the person photographed. Or maybe that would be precisely a justification to resume processing and try to obtain more interesting results.

I do have made some adjustments. Although I am far from mastering curves, I was able to achieve a better result, but now for example, the person's back starts to look pixelated and the peripheral outline of the statue is also pixelated. Not good !
Cheers !

[DanK]

the person's back starts to look pixelated and the peripheral outline of the statue is also pixelated.

Antonio,

This suggests to me that something is wrong with your editing workflow. You should not be getting pixelation if you are shooting raw.

If you are shooting raw, your camera is probably capturing either 12-bit or 14-bit images. These are fine enough that pixelation is very rare. Your workflow should be in 16 bit mode to preserve all of that detail until when you are completely finished. At that time, when there is no more editing to be done, you can convert to JPEG, which is 8-bit.

If you edit your raw images in Lightroom, you are OK, as that is 16-bit by default. In photoshop, you can use the image_mode menu to change to 16 bit if it's 8-bit. The file name in the tab for the image at the top will indicate bit depth.

If you are editing something other than a raw file, make sure you are saving the TIFF or PSD to 16 bits. This has to be done when the file is first created. Saving an 8-bit image as 16-bit does not add back the missing data.

Dan

[The amateur]

Thank you again Dan !

I don't know if the camera I took this photo with shoots in 16 bits. It's a SonyRX100II.
I think so, but I'm not completely sure, even though I looked for the answer to this question online. Or maybe I didn't look enough.

I made a Denoise that LR generated as *png and continued from there in LR and later in CC, but I don't remember all the steps and I don't keep files with all the layers, because they take up too much space and that doesn't justify it for my purpose.

Although I really like to do it well.
As Dan can see, everything comes out in 16 bits and I believe the problem is mine that I pixelize the images in editing.
Thanks again !

[DanK]

Thank you again Dan !

I don't know if the camera I took this photo with shoots in 16 bits. It's a SonyRX100II.
I think so, but I'm not completely sure, even though I looked for the answer to this question online. Or maybe I didn't look enough.

I made a Denoise that LR generated as *png and continued from there in LR and later in CC, but I don't remember all the steps and I don't keep files with all the layers, because they take up too much space and that doesn't justify it for my purpose.

Although I really like to do it well.
As Dan can see, everything comes out in 16 bits and I believe the problem is mine that I pixelize the images in editing.
Thanks again !

These images show that these settings are what they should be. So, that wasn't the source of the pixelation. The question is what was the source because with a 16-bit file, it is very rare for regular editing, even if it's extreme, to cause visible pixelation.

I assume you meant DNG file, not PNG file. The AI denoise in LR creates a DNG, which is an Adobe format of raw file, so no problem there.

Manual noise reduction in Lightroom will not affect the amount of pixelation, but it will make it less obvious because it smooths edges.

However, AI-based noise reduction is entirely different and can't be reduced to a clear mathematical relationship. So, I just did a very limited experiment. I took a Canon raw file and applied LR's AI-based denoise. The image was very clean, so I blew it up to 800%, at which level you can see pixelation. I then snipped a partial screen shot from the original *.CR2 and the denoised *.DNG and put them side by side. The amount of pixelation appears the same, as I would expect, but in this case, Denoise didn't make the pixelation much less apparent. It didn't do much to smooth out the edges.

Since you have discarded the layers, it may be impossible to figure out where the pixelation arises. it may be in the original image, if you have cropped enough. If not, one could go through the editing steps one by one to see where it appears.

[The amateur]

Thank you very much Dan again for all the time you took to write these lines and to guide me on how to best present well-made photographs.

Yes, I really meant DNG and not PNG as I wrote.
You are quite right and thank you for the correction.

As I usually delete all layers to save hard drive space, I will have to be careful in the future and before this procedure, carefully check if the pixilation appears or not and proceed accordingly.

Again thank you very much for all the assistance and for your patience.
A healthy year. !