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10/07/2002 01:53:02 PM · #1 |
| The majority of the pictures entered for the garbage contest were out of focus. That is the first fundamental of photography making your subject clear. I would guess that maybe 10% of us had our image in focus. I will make this short for I usually create a firestorm with my comments. Anyone else have a comment on about the lack of focus? |
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10/07/2002 02:11:01 PM · #2 |
I've seen a few that aren't in the sharpest of focus, some of which I believe may have been intentional, some not. But if you actually mean 90% are poorly focused, I think you may need to double check your monitor. I would put the number of "focus-challenged" entries closer to 15%.
If you were exaggerating for dramatic effect then please ignore my anal mathematics :) |
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10/07/2002 02:16:25 PM · #3 |
I think you should look at a photograph on its own merit.
Sometimes a slightly out of focused photograph is better than something that is completely in focus. You could create a lot of interesting photographs back in the film days by using a high speed film (grain) + a bit of outof focus (blurring), giving you a painting like image.
Originally posted by bobgaither:
The majority of the pictures entered for the garbage contest were out of focus. That is the first fundamental of photography making your subject clear. I would guess that maybe 10% of us had our image in focus. I will make this short for I usually create a firestorm with my comments. Anyone else have a comment on about the lack of focus?
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10/07/2002 02:42:24 PM · #4 |
| I know mine looks out-of-focus but before I compressed and reduced the size it was totally sharp with full depth of field. Unfortunately, even after using PS to sharpen it after compressing, it lost a lot of it's quality. I say this because a photo could start out being sharp but after reducing the size and compressing it to jpeg, the small details can meld together. |
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10/07/2002 02:43:51 PM · #5 |
| Some of that is also "beyond control" due to the effects of resampling and compression. |
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10/07/2002 02:50:16 PM · #6 |
It's probably not compression if you select the best quality (near the 150 kbytes limit). The problem is screen size. 640x480 really limits what you can show. Also, monitors have 72pixels/inch in resolution, usually. THis is a far cry from 300 pixels/inch on print.
This is one of the reasons why i think macro and studio shots work well on DPc and unless the landscape is very general, landscapes don't usually do well, especially if you're capturing leaves or very fine detailed images. After shrinking it down to 640x480, you can barely see a thing and it would appear "out of focus" for the leaves.
Originally posted by joanns:
I know mine looks out-of-focus but before I compressed and reduced the size it was totally sharp with full depth of field. Unfortunately, even after using PS to sharpen it after compressing, it lost a lot of it's quality. I say this because a photo could start out being sharp but after reducing the size and compressing it to jpeg, the small details can meld together.
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10/07/2002 03:56:11 PM · #7 |
Resizing sharpness problems....... What kind of resample algorhitm do people use? I resample from 6mp files -Fuji SuperCCD interpolated ones- to 640x481 (crop out the 1 pixel line) with Lanczos* and personally don't think I loose much sharpness or detail. I do find that other algoritms (that use less info in the calculations) affect the image quality too much.
Something I see a lot lately is bad compressing. Unnecessarily low quality settings resulting in horrible artifacts and visible blocks. Is there a link on the submission page (for example the "150kb") that points to a small resample & jpeg compression faq?
You see it a lot in the forums that people are advised to use a copy of the original, work on it, save it as a 640x480 Tiff, save it as several jpegs with different quality settings (experiment with the 88 to 97% quality setting) to get as near to 150kb as possible and pick the nearest. That's good advise.
Is such a waste when a probably good pic is ruined by bad compression or resampling. :-(
*Irfanview
* This message has been edited by the author on 10/7/2002 3:55:44 PM. |
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10/07/2002 04:08:29 PM · #8 |
Some people, on my shot for certain, are confusing the image being out of focus -- which I don't believe it is -- with some haziness in the item itself. I can't go too much further without identifying my shot, but let me say that spray paint often leaves a blurred edge that I know is being confused with lack of focus detail. Annoying, but what can one do?
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10/07/2002 04:15:27 PM · #9 |
This is what i do:
I get my image from the camera at 16 bit TIFF.
I do all the contrast/level thing in the original size.
Then if I want to submit to DPC, i resize it to 640x480 or whatever using BICUBIC algorithm.
THEN I run sharpen. YOu should only do sharpen last. I then use save for web option in photoshop (that way the photo gets saved using the web's color space rather than whatever your camera does, and if it doesn't look ok, you might have to start over and pplay with hue and saturation more), save it as close to 150kbytes as i can get.
Naturally, if you have very similar colors, you can get the higehst quality JPEG versus someone who shows a lot of detail. The last image i submitted i can only do 77% in the quality rating because it has a lot of colors and bumps on the walls which requires more details in the compression.
Tony
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10/07/2002 07:25:19 PM · #10 |
| People are confusing out of focus with motion blur on mine. gerr. IT moved not me. |
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10/07/2002 08:33:36 PM · #11 |
| I agree people need to compress their images into the size they want and then edited them. Most of the images were not done in this matter, thus leaving them out of focus or no detail. The simplest editing was not done right. |
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10/07/2002 09:34:27 PM · #12 |
I didn't edit mine... It's just a crappy old FD-71 640x480 native resolution. Focus was as good as it gets. Composition was as good as I get. Which is just about as crappy. Thought I'd be a shoe-in for the winner, since most of my stuff is garbage. ;)
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10/07/2002 10:19:49 PM · #13 |
Originally posted by bobgaither:
I agree people need to compress their images into the size they want and then edited them. Most of the images were not done in this matter, thus leaving them out of focus or no detail. The simplest editing was not done right.
I don't agree with this. I edit at full size in TIFF, then resize (although I prefer to compose my shots so that I can crop a full 640x480 slice), then sharpen (unsharp mode), then convert.
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10/07/2002 11:09:47 PM · #14 |
No, i disagree.
Compressing first means loss of quality. You should do all edits and resize, then SHARPEN (last step). Then you do compression. If the compression gives you artifacts, then either lower the sharpening or increase it and try again.
Remember, when you save JPEG the FIRST TIME and save it AGAIN, you are doing TWO compression, not just once.
Originally posted by bobgaither:
I agree people need to compress their images into the size they want and then edited them. Most of the images were not done in this matter, thus leaving them out of focus or no detail. The simplest editing was not done right.
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10/07/2002 11:48:11 PM · #15 |
| My camera only records in jpeg mode. First I convert to psd file, then I select the 640x480 image I want to end up with (either by grabbing those dimensions or by resampling), then do levels and curves, then Unsharpen. I play with the Unsharpen settings quite a bit to find the fine line between sharpness and avoiding artefacts. Then I save for web at the highest quality possible to stay within 150K as a jpeg. |
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