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Grayscale required, or is tinted monochrome OK?

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Thanks to Elsinore for doing my OBOs. I drove 917 miles yesterday with no access to a computer.

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I’ve had no muse for a couple of weeks, but wanted to pop in and say I’m enjoying these 🙂

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First off, you want to resize your image in Photoshop (or the image editing software of your choice) to no more than 640 pixels wide for Farktography, since if you send a larger size it will automatically be resized down anyway. Think of it like this (and not factoring in jpeg compression) :

A camera produces a 3000×2000 image. That’s 6 million pixels(for argument’s sake- let’s not get pedantic here)

Resizing that image to the 640×426 brings it down to about 272,000 pixels.

Jpeg compression brings the size down farther. Fark has an (approximately) 200K limit on inline images, to help keep threads loading at a reasonable speed. The quality setting you mention, will, by reducing the spatial frequencies (essentially tossing fine detail) reduces the file size even farther. For Farktography, I usually set it at 5 or so, since the monitor doesn’t show fine detail at hose sizes anyway.

Also, over-sharpening a photo can increase file size dramatically- try going a tiny bit softer- at smaller sizes it’s less noticeable. The name of the game is to reduce the amount of high-frequency signal in the photo (i.e. fine complicated detail) so as to let the compression engine work better.

One trick is to apply selective sharpening- make a duplicate layer of your photo – sharpen that, and then use a layer mask to hide high-frequency areas where sharpening isn’t all that important (background foliage for example).

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Voted!

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I decided to leave it fairly open: Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, as it were. People in the photos is fine: I just cut off abandoned buildings, to try and focus the photos more on live industry.

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The first rule of Farktography should be “Don’t sweat the small stuff.”

Votes are a poor measure of quality, because I’ve seen hundreds of beautiful photos go by the wayside in favor of a funny or clever entry here. It’s going to happen.

The best way to get better is to just keep shooting. You will eventually develop and eye and learn things as if by osmosis. It’s quite literally a practice-makes-perfect hobby. When someone says something nice to me, I try to keep my head screwed on straight by remembering that for all the nice shots they praise, I shot a few thousand crappy ones to get there.

What I’m saying, long-windedly, I’m afraid, is that you can’t rush this. By the same token, if you love shooting, don’t get discouraged by not instantly living up to your expectations of yourself. I’ve been shooting crappy photographs for 40 years, and loved every minute of it.

Just enjoy yourself.

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Wow, that was interesting.
I had no idea you were the kind of person who used “autodidactic” so casually.

How many of your CaptureIndy shots were originally taken for Farktography contests, and vice versa? Which is winning the battle for your heart?

Oh, Farktography has always been first in my heart 🙂 Some of those shots were taken in anticipation of a contest, but most are just because I love to shoot, when I can.

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*bow* Thanks all!

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I realized, when I finished my entry, I didn’t have enough left to put in another shot, seeing as how I quit smoking a while back. So I put a level of meta-information in mine.

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thanks schnee and NoBigDeal. i have re shot one and will upload and enter it. along with a “real” one. both of which will tank but that’s OK since i now do this more for my enjoyment than anything else.

I, on the other hand, will be making a profound artistic statement and deep social commentary that will woo not only this generation, but generations to come, cementing my place in internet art history and giving rise to not just a new artistic style, but also a new means of participating in being an artist, as art historians will later describe it. Tonight will be the sort of polarizing epoch that only comes about once every 1,000 years or so. Tonight, I join the ranks of the cavemen who discovered pigment can be smeared on stuff and whoever invented beauty.

Raise your hands- it’s too late to save the boots 🙂

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Thankee- that is one of my faves. Schnee said he was going to try and fix the thumbnailing for the FSM.

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I chose deliberately dull photos from my reject pile, that I thought might be good for base images. We shall see.

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It works for me. Looks like there’s (at least as far as the US goes) two centers of population- once close to Indianapolis and one in the Pacific Northwest. Anyone good with math to confirm/refute? I can’t figure out any way to do that other than brute-forcing it.

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The dodge and burn tools in Photoshop are not exactly the same effect as you expect, and they do not work *at all* like you would intuit them to.

A more correct way to dodge and burn in Photoshop is to add a new copy layer and a layer mask filled with black (Alt-click on the layer mask button) and change the layer blend mode to screen for dodging (making lighter) or multiply for burning (making darker). Using a soft-edged brush, paint white on the layer mask where you want to dodge/burn. When you’re done, use the layer transparency slider to tune the effect. Flatten the Image. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Bonus protip: When thinking of.working with layer masks in Photoshop, remember this- black conceals, white reveals.[/b]

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