Satellite Dish

[Archangel]

Ibiscus macro. Shot taken at daytime under direct noon sunlight.
Comments welcomed.





Regards

George

[Stephen]

Re: Satellite Dish

Ibiscus macro. Shot taken at daytime under direct noon sunlight.
Comments welcomed.

Regards

George

Hi George, let me put my cards on the table from the outset I'm not a great fan of this type of specimen flower shot, unless they are done under more controlled conditions. However I am a fan of the Hibiscus flower and this is a beautiful specimen .

Now, for me though, the midday sun is not doing it a lot of favours, consequently I feel you have tried to compensate by giving it a more dramatic effect through the black background, cloning out any stem or natural background there may have been in order to concentrate the eye on the flower head.

I think then that we are beginning to see the limitations of your camera here, and this shows itself in the slight 'blockiness' of the oversaturated colours. By this I mean you have lost some of the detail in the colour. Also detail in the stamen/anther, and the fallen pollen on the lower leaf is being lost with some jpeg artefacts I feel, or possibly this is the effect of sharpening, not sure.

Now I had a play with the image, tried to reduce the contrast by increasing shadow detail in the petals and reducing saturation a little too. I have also increased levels and contrast in the stamen area just to give it a lift. You may say some of the colour vibrancy has been lost, but I definately feel there is now more texture and detail in some of the petal area where before there was colour blockiness.

Just some of my thoughts for what its worth

[Archangel]

Re: Satellite Dish

Hi George, let me put my cards on the table from the outset I'm not a great fan of this type of specimen flower shot, unless they are done under more controlled conditions. However I am a fan of the Hibiscus flower and this is a beautiful specimen .

Now, for me though, the midday sun is not doing it a lot of favours, consequently I feel you have tried to compensate by giving it a more dramatic effect through the black background, cloning out any stem or natural background there may have been in order to concentrate the eye on the flower head.

I think then that we are beginning to see the limitations of your camera here, and this shows itself in the slight 'blockiness' of the oversaturated colours. By this I mean you have lost some of the detail in the colour. Also detail in the stamen/anther, and the fallen pollen on the lower leaf is being lost with some jpeg artefacts I feel, or possibly this is the effect of sharpening, not sure.

Now I had a play with the image, tried to reduce the contrast by increasing shadow detail in the petals and reducing saturation a little too. I have also increased levels and contrast in the stamen area just to give it a lift. You may say some of the colour vibrancy has been lost, but I definately feel there is now more texture and detail in some of the petal area where before there was colour blockiness.

Just some of my thoughts for what its worth

Hi Stephen,

This is some kind of experiments I conduct lately, by isolating flowers from the entire photo. It is not my favorite type of photography either. I just started to learn how to isolate images from the rest of the photos.
Obviously I haven't done such a good job by doing this and trying different methods and the results are not the expected.

Though the original photo is much better, less saturated and less sharpened. I mentioned about direct sunlight not because it is the best way to photograph things, but because when I saw the hibiscus was that time of the day not helping so much this type of photography.

Yes, I saw your attempt. Indeed the flower looks better now. I just posted as it was after applying all these tricks to isolate it from the rest of the environment. It is not a problem of camera limitation, it is a problem with the way I tried to isolate it from its enviroment. As I said I'm experimenting in this type of isolation, but as it looks I'm not doing it the proper way.
If you know how this isolation can be done in Paint Shop Pro, any guidance would be welcomed.

Since you like though Hibiscus, if you want I can send you the original image to do your magic, since you are much more advanced in post processing.

Here is the original untouched image straight out of the camera and only reduced in size.





Regards

George

[Stephen]

Re: Satellite Dish

I'm all for experimenting George, I did it myself not too long ago with some flower heads in the studio. There are some in my galleries I believe. Anyway I can see what you were trying to do as the background is a little busy maybe distracting. However at the same time it can be nice to put the flower into the context of its situation and position. Maybe this one is not ideal, but you may have been dictated to by its position. Nevertheless, I perhaps may have thought along the lines of reducing the aperture and standing further back and zooming in a little more, in order to reduce the depth of field and blur the background, I think looking at the Exif you still would have had the potential to do this.

I've tried to simulate this, maybe not too well, by using some Gaussian blur on the selected background, don't forget to add a substantial feather to the selection, depending on the size of your file, think I used 40pixels on this version. I filled in a few gaps with the blur brush on a low tolerance. Finally the old trick of adding a vignette to the corners to darken them and therefore concentrate the eye more on the flower.

Its just one take on trying to enhance the image, but for me there is a substantial difference on the original.

BTW I applied no sharpening and I think the artefacts mentioned before and certainly the colour blocking are better on this version.

[Archangel]

Re: Satellite Dish

I'm all for experimenting George, I did it myself not too long ago with some flower heads in the studio. There are some in my galleries I believe. Anyway I can see what you were trying to do as the background is a little busy maybe distracting. However at the same time it can be nice to put the flower into the context of its situation and position. Maybe this one is not ideal, but you may have been dictated to by its position. Nevertheless, I perhaps may have thought along the lines of reducing the aperture and standing further back and zooming in a little more, in order to reduce the depth of field and blur the background, I think looking at the Exif you still would have had the potential to do this.

I've tried to simulate this, maybe not too well, by using some Gaussian blur on the selected background, don't forget to add a substantial feather to the selection, depending on the size of your file, think I used 40pixels on this version. I filled in a few gaps with the blur brush on a low tolerance. Finally the old trick of adding a vignette to the corners to darken them and therefore concentrate the eye more on the flower.

Its just one take on trying to enhance the image, but for me there is a substantial difference on the original.

BTW I applied no sharpening and I think the artefacts mentioned before and certainly the colour blocking are better on this version.

Stephen,

I couldn't take this shot different. I took it in macro. The flower was higher on a tree and I had to lift the camera up, guide it through other clones and leaves that were in front of that flower. If I could do it different I would have.

What exactly do you mean by artifacts and color blocking?
Do you mean that the flower leaves look rough?
The hibiscus is like this. It's leaves are rough and have some mysterious kind of texture and waiving that look like they are formed from very tiny blocks or form some kind of canvas.
Maybe in UK it exists some different hibiscus variety with smooth or smoother leaves (which is not strange as I saw in UK some flowers that we don't have them here in Greece and the opposite), but here in Greece all hibiscus leaves are like that, with rough leaves.
I do have other hibiscus photos from different camera and all are like that.
Here is another macro shot from a different camera, again under direct sunlight near a cafe by the sea in my country place.





Regards

George

[lumix]

Re: Satellite Dish

George this is getting away from your original idea for this image but I feel this hard cropped version achieves much the same. Hope you don't mind me posting an example.

[Archangel]

Re: Satellite Dish

George this is getting away from your original idea for this image but I feel this hard cropped version achieves much the same. Hope you don't mind me posting an example.

Ron,

I don't mind at all when someone is experimenting by manipulating any of my posted images. You never know what you can learn from someone else's experiment and besides that, I believe that all these threads with hundreds of posted photos, are to help make our photos better and better.

So, I don't mind at all for experimenting with my photos and there is no need for anybody to ask me for permission to do so

Thanks Ron, for taking the time to view and edit further my photo.


Regards

George

[Stephen]

Re: Satellite Dish

What exactly do you mean by artifacts and color blocking?

George

Hi George, in the first shot you posted some parts of the petal esp the one at 12 '0 clock the texture of the petal has been lost somewhat, with what I suspected was too much saturation. This is referred to as colour blocking. In my version, by reducing the saturation I managed to get back some of the texture.

As for artefacts, I noticed these around the stamen area, and on the pollen that had fallen onto the petal below. Its not exactly pixelated but the pixels seem to take on the form of vertical and horizontal lines, therefore the detail is lost a little. Its often the result of over sharpening sometimes over compression. Your unadjusted version was much better in this respect.

I also find that its sometimes a characteristic of over processing files from small sensor camera, that have already had processing applied in the jpeg creation, they then struggle sometimes to accept more in the software. In my experience, larger sensor camera, such as dSLR's are more forgiving, esp. if Raw mode is used.

[Archangel]

Re: Satellite Dish

Hi George, in the first shot you posted some parts of the petal esp the one at 12 '0 clock the texture of the petal has been lost somewhat, with what I suspected was too much saturation. This is referred to as colour blocking. In my version, by reducing the saturation I managed to get back some of the texture.

As for artefacts, I noticed these around the stamen area, and on the pollen that had fallen onto the petal below. Its not exactly pixelated but the pixels seem to take on the form of vertical and horizontal lines, therefore the detail is lost a little. Its often the result of over sharpening sometimes over compression. Your unadjusted version was much better in this respect.

I also find that its sometimes a characteristic of over processing files from small sensor camera, that have already had processing applied in the jpeg creation, they then struggle sometimes to accept more in the software. In my experience, larger sensor camera, such as dSLR's are more forgiving, esp. if Raw mode is used.

Stephen,

I see what you mean. Excuse me because in English language forums, I'm always in the process of thinking Greek and translating in English and reading English and translating to Greek. While these terms are mostly common in Greek and English it is not exactly a true translation of to each other.
All these terms are in my mind but as I know them in Greek and sometimes I get lost in translation

Now in relation to these two aspects you mentioned:

1. Color Blocking:
Indeed it a appears as you say. This is because I use very high compression (1:25) on top of the 1:5 ratio Panasonic uses for jpeg compression, to compress a 2.5Mb files down to 150k for gallery display and for being able to save as much possible space for more photos in the future in my galleries. Also maybe you have observed that some lines appear to have jaggies, which is also due to the high compression. The full size picture looks more normal, but not completely because it was slightly windy that day and whichever part of the flower was not completely covered by the camera in front of it had a slight waving.

2. Artifacts:
Same as before, due to high compression. The full size shot looks OK. Though the FZ5 has tendency to produce sharp photos (but never seen artifacts myself at full size), but of course is not a DSLR either and would be wise to expect DSLR photo quality from a tiny compact superzoom.


Regards

George