Not to taste

Image Critiques
1

RussulaNPN
RussulaNPN2500×1877 2.39 MB

Critique Style: Standard

The photographer is looking for thoughtful feedback on the image as a whole, especially around the areas noted below.

Feedback Focus: Technical Help

About This Image

If the last photo from yesterday wasn’t enough red and green, I thought I’d add this one.

A 30-ish image stack of a Russula I found on the trail near the Prairie River. Usually by the time they get to this stage, they’ve been nibbled a lot more than this. Plus they are VERY fragile (often called Brittle gills) and so being in the trail it’s a wonder it isn’t destroyed. Although, come to think of it, not many people go to this spot so maybe it isn’t. Whenever I do long focus bracketing sessions, things appear moving around in the scene that I either didn’t notice or were too small for me to see. That happened here and I did my best to get rid of the mess since none were clear or whole enough to be “fixed” into place. I think there was a Caddisfly or moth, a Daddy longlegs, a mosquito-looking thing, a stone fly and something else that just left odd swishy blurs behind. No idea what that might have been.

Feedback Requested

Anyway…as you might think, this required a crap-ton of retouching in Zerene. The details brush is amazing as it mainly preserves the light and color of a DMap while transferring the detail from a PMax stack. I ranged anywhere from 50 to 400% in search of weirdness, goopiness and haloes. Probably I missed some. BOLO please! Project is still open. Oh and I know the ISO is high. I forgot to change it when I was shooting something that moved in the breeze.

Technical Details

Camera: Panasonic DC-G9M2
Lens: OM 90mm F3.5
Focal length: 90mm
Shutter speed: 1/80s
Aperture: f/4.5
ISO: 640

Tripod/handheld: Tripod
Focus method: SAF
Filters: polarizer
Technique: 0/+ bracketing method with probably 2 steps
Conditions: breezy and smokey

Processing software: Lr for everything aside from stacking, Zerene for that
Major adjustments: Global sliders to massage dynamic range, denoise + sharpening, some texture and wb tweak.
Blending/stacking: Slabbing method to make both DMap and PMax mini stacks, did a PMax stack of DMap images just for fun and then used that as the basis for the retouched final using PMax details and some other bits from some of the DMap slabs
Other notes: Some cropping, distraction removal and basic slider adjustments in Lighroom to the resulting TIFF.

Phew.

2

I searched this as thoroughly as I could, Kris, without finding any swirly, smudgy artifacts. It certainly looks luscious and obviously some critters find it so. In looking at it closely I found one little white spec in the gills a bit above the right edge of the stem that looks out of place (tried to draw an area around it, but I must have done something wrong).

I really do love the red on green in this image. It’s amazingly eye catching.

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This is very interesting. Technical Marvel. Very well seen and executed. Does your camera help out with the stacking. Or is this manual stacking? I also use Zerene And I know how tedious it can be to do corrections..

Nicely done

4

Thanks @Dennis_Plank & @David_Schoen glad you like it. Green and red are striking. The white spot is some kind of crud. I can get rid of it.

The camera does the focus bracketing, meaning it takes a set number of photos the way I tell it to, but the stacking I do in Zerene.