fjablo wrote:
Nice pictures but something in the processing makes them look like watercolor paintings, with all the detail lost - looks like very aggressive noise reduction and/or lots of compression when uploading. Maybe check some of those settings?
Hmm. (Thanks for the observations and critique.) The only processing was with GIMP, resized to 1400 long dimension, application of GIMP's Enhance/Sharpen algorithm using the default parameters to remove any resized-induced fuzziness, then saved as jpg with nominal 100% accuracy. The downsizing may have cost some detail.
The two tree shots were with my 35mm and 50mm. The Concord River was with the 35mm (IIRC).
For the dragonfly I would normally use the 200mm from a distance but in this case it was probably with the 35mm, maybe with the 50mm, because that's what was mounted at the time. I extracted a 9.7MByte (2363 long dimension) section using MS Paint, saved as bmp, processed with GIMP as with the others. So the compression wasn't quite as much as for the others. Otherwise I'd say no special processing.
Maybe GIMP isn't the best tool. Or maybe the originals were not so great. I miss the split-image focusing of my Nikkormat! So for your critiquing pleasure, here are the originals. They were captured in the Z5 II as "Fine *" jpg's, Auto color balance. The red tree is a sugar maple that really looks like that!
fjablo wrote:
Nice pictures but something in the processing makes them look like watercolor paintings, with all the detail lost - looks like very aggressive noise reduction and/or lots of compression when uploading. Maybe check some of those settings?
Hmm. (Thanks for the observations and critique.) The only processing was with GIMP, resized to 1400 long dimension, application of GIMP's Enhance/Sharpen algorithm using the default parameters to remove any resized-induced fuzziness, then saved as jpg with nominal 100% accuracy. The downsizing may have cost some detail.
The two tree shots were with my 35mm and 50mm. The Concord River was with the 35mm (IIRC).
For the dragonfly I would normally use the 200mm from a distance but in this case it was probably with the 35mm, maybe with the 50mm, because that's what was mounted at the time. I extracted a 98.7MByte (2363 long dimension) section using MS Paint, saved as bmp, processed with GIMP as with the others. So the compression wasn't quite as much as for the others. Otherwise I'd say no special processing.
Maybe GIMP isn't the best tool. Or maybe the originals were not so great. I miss the split-image focusing of my Nikkormat! So for your critiquing pleasure, here are the originals. They were captured in the Z5 II as "Fine *" jpg's, Auto color balance. The red tree is a sugar maple that really looks like that!
