06-15-11 – In Deep Shadow

Opinion please?

http://i141.photobucket.com/albums/r69/clouddancer19/Project%20365/IMG_0711.jpg

Thanks.

orionid, in my experience, there is a spectrum of opinion among farktographers regarding this topic. As I’m sure you have seen, I fall to the lenient post-processing-is-part-of-the-artistic-expression side of the spectrum. Others, like curious I believe, are toward the straight-out-of-camera-is-the-artistic-challenge side. In my opinion, neither is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. It only becomes an ethical question if someone crosses the boundaries of fair-play that we all use to have a relatively level playing field. The rules are here –

http://farktography.net/index.php?module=htmlpages&func=display&pid=8&cm=3&cb=31

I don’t see anything there that precludes the use of post-processing such as Topaz – unless the results are cartoonish.

That’s my 2 cents. I’m interested to know how close my opinion is to the middle.

I’ve never used topaz adjust so I’m trying to remember it from the last time it came up. If I remember right part of the problem with it was that it didn’t apply evenly across the entire image and would work differently in different localized sections(or something like that). So I guess Im wondering does the sharpening work across the entire image similar to how photoshop’s sharpening works?

It can go either way. It has four sections: Exposure, Detail, Color, and Noise. Noise and Detail are always applied evenly across the whole photo, whereas Exposure and Color can have anywhere from 1-50 logical regions. If you set this at 1, it will apply even across the whole image. If you set it at anything else, it will select that many regions based on photo content (looking for edges, transitions, etc. Even if you have multiple regions, some settings are still universal. Only “adaptive” settings are individually evaluated by region.

Example, If I loaded a photo and said 5 exposure regions, then set adaptive exposure to 0.75 (from 0-1) and left everything else at a default, then each region would be adjusted so that regions exposure is raised by 75% of the available histogram (Thus making darker areas receive more of a boost than lighter areas). Likewise if I set it at 0.25, lighter areas would be prone to darken while shadows stayed the same. If Adaptive exposure were set to 0.5 (no adjustment), and I started tweaking the other settings under exposure (Contrast, Brightness, Highlight and Shadow), those will all be equally applied.

Where it gets hairy with Details vs. Sharpen is in one additional ability. For the most part, The details portion is a highly-sophisticated sharpen tool, but has an additional option to integrate details with exposure. All this does is identify edges, and adjust the local exposure along the edge so that the lighter side gets a few values lighter and transitions back to it’s normal self, and the darker side gets a few values darker and transitions back to it’s normal self. It’s not terribly unlike the “Clarity” function in Adobe RAW, it just has the ability to interact with/be limited to the detail specifications, making it much more powerful than either “Clarity” or “sharpen” by themselves.

I personally try not to use it with Farktography because, as discussed previously (although, I don’t remember the thread), was that it could be abused with the regional slicing of exposure and/or color, and produce effects similar to tonemapping, while not being a true HDR. I’ve just considered it to be easier to just not use it, rather than consistently use it in mild application, and have to defend why it’s not “Too software-y”

Opinion please?

http://i141.photobucket.com/albums/r69/clouddancer19/Project%20365/IMG_0711.jpg

Thanks.

I kind of have to echo CISS. I love love love dark, saturated images, and my monitor at work, being one of those too dark to view dark photos, but still passable for internet and MS Office, have shown me more than once a dark black rectangle that was my farktography entry for the week. I like to think it’s an extreme case, but I imagine not. As such, I’ll get a photo the way I like it, then lighten it just a bit.

This being said, your photo looks waaaay to dark even on my good monitor. I see a lamp, a pole and some silhouetted trees. I think a longer exposure and WB tweaking would have done this shot wonders.

/Just MHO.

I’ll echo Elsinore’s earlier comment on the orionid shot. I don’t see why you’d be messing much with the image to begin with. But that’s just me.

For Clouddancer I agree with the others, though I’m in Colorado visiting my aunt, who’s in two gallery showings that I wanted to be able to see, so I can’t view on my newer better monitor.

I can say that it appears we all have some differences of opinion on what this theme is about, and I’m glad there will be a nice tolerance for how each of us will interpret the theme. 😀 I think I may have gotten one entry while I was casually taking snapshots around her home, but maybe not. I forgot my CF card reader and it takes forever to download a few images from the camera directly.

ps; 1 edit. Any reason the command doesn’t work here?