Rework with less processing to reduce processing artifacts. Not as much visible through the steam, but at least no introduced weirdness.
Original:
Critique Style Requested: Standard
The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
Another steamy morning on our recent workshop. The morning light hitting these low hills framed by the steam caught my eye. The skeletal tree felt like it was turning away from the light and added a bit of a story for me.
Specific Feedback
In the top part of the image, I got strange, short horizontal lines throughout. It was in the RAW file, so it must be something intrinsic to the sensor (or maybe I had grunge on the lens?). Anyone seen that before? I blurred the steam area a bit to lessen the lines.
Any other comments welcome.
Technical Details
Ran it through DxO for noise reduction, local exposure adjustments, color balance.
3 Likes
Lovely and unusual – and the trees do add a nice touch! I love how the mist frames both sides and the water makes a very nice base.
I’ve seen strange artifacts when a card was failing, but what you describe doesn’t sound like anything I’ve seen before. Do you have two card slots, so you are able to write duplicate files? Always a good idea.
If you still have the images on the card, do the lines show up on the back of the camera? Have you tried to shoot a white card (or gray sky) and see if you can replicate it. But if so, you probably would have seen it in other shots from the trip.
Would you post the portion of the image (top half, or whatever) to show the lines before you smoothed them out? Maybe do a boosted contrast to show them more readily.
Thanks, @Diane_Miller, for your input. I went back to square one, reset everything, and started again. The original file was VERY low contrast and I think bringing up the contrast (curves in ACR) introduced some nonsense, but not too much. What probably made it worse was dehazing some of the steamy bits to bring the trees out more. A second version where I didn’t do that doesn’t have noticeable weirdness except if you look really closely. Will post that version.
I have seen some bizarre things lately when pushing contrast (which Dehase also does) on Milky Way images, that I think are artifacts of algorithms, and not things in the raw file. I find that rather worrisome.
Now I think I see what you were referring to – just the result of tonal stretching. It doesn’t look strange to me, but just like some vertical columns of the steam. I am drawn to the bolder color and brightness of the original. A wonderful image!
1 Like
Bonnie, I much prefer the original image with it’s contrast and more detail.my eye the reworked image seems to have too much denoise applied resulting in loss of detail. JMHO. I also don’t see the artifacts you are talking about.
1 Like
