The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
Another of our mini-cacti. This flower is about 2/3 the diameter of a dime. It closes in the evening and will reopen when it gets full sun. There were a couple of other blooms trying to open but I was able to isolate this more complete one with the high mag rig. >=))>
Specific Feedback
Hard to crop this without cutting off some of the spine centers. Anything too distracting?
Technical Details
Sony A77II
Minolta 200mm macro
ISO 100, 1/320 @ f8, 14 image stack in Helicon focus
Critique Template
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Bill, this is really lovely. hard to believe the flower is this small - fine work with your macro rig. Flower and spines are tack-sharp, the comp is perfect IMO, and that magenta and green is gorgeous.
Bill, this is another great look at a tiny cactus bloom. The spines are nicely sharp throughout…yea stacking… In looking at the large view, I do see two stacking artifacts, that you may or may not be aware of. I’ve indicated these a cropped view of your photo.
Circled in Black: When you have something that you want sharp in front of something else you want sharp, the only way to avoid a slight halo of softness is to have enough dof to get both parts sharp in the same frame. If the overlap is not terribly complex, you can fix the halo in PS via cloning. In this case, with all of the spines behind the petals, you’d spend a long time cloning out the halo.
Circled in red: I believe that Helicon uses both brightness and darkness as a secondary sharpness criteria. Especially when it finds something bright (bright but not pure white does the trick). It creates “holes” in what’s in front. If you look closely at the two red circled spots, you’ll see that a bit of the petal is missing, with the spine that’s behind showing. These can be fixed during retouching in Helicon.
Mark: Thanks for the detailed explanation. I did in fact do some cloning work on those areas you noted but perhaps didn’t do a good enough job. I have not advanced to learning how to do retouching in Helicon so that needs to go on my to do list. Thanks again for sharing your expertise >=))>
Retouching is pretty straight forward. Click on the retouching tab, which lets you see both the final result and any of the individual shots. Find the right individual shot and use the clone tool for the specific area.
A lovely image, Bill. Hard to believe you were able to get such a small area so well captured. I haven’t tried stacking yet so I leave that to you pros. To me this is a fine image.
Beautiful image, Bill. Yeah, a couple of minor artifacts, but it takes pixel peeping to find them. Hang this on a wall and literally no one would notice (though if you see someone walking up to it with a magnifying glass, you might want to boot them out). I really like this one. It works very nicely.
The one trick that @Mark_Seaver didn’t mention is that in the edit mode of Helicon, you’re two images will be side by side, so you need to zoom in quite a ways and scan until you find all those pesky little anomalies.
Great image photo, Bill. The sharpness of the catus and flower came out very will. I have not done a lot of focus stacking but I have the software you use. Good color contrast
In looking at the large view, I do see two stacking artifacts, that you may or may not be aware of. I’ve indicated these a cropped view of your photo.
