How do you treat an in-focus "strip" in an image?

[jaydesi]

<p>I took the picture below and because of the DOF I chose, I have an in-focus strip across the photo, with everything else nicely blurred, both shallower and deeper. However, I think the strip looks strange. Should I blur the unimportant sharp areas in post processing, or crop to reduce the appearance of the sharpened zone? I went with the crop option first, but I'm not sure about it. How would you handle this?</p>

<p>The photo is a JPEG processed by the camera; I shoot RAW + JPEG but I'm at work without any RAW processing software.</p>

<p>Thanks for your help!</p><div></div>

[richardsnow]

<p>The in-focus "strip" looks natural to me. If you don't like it, crop it to taste. If you blur it in PS or other editing software, it may look funny.<br>

<br />RS</p>

[craig_big]

I agree that it needs cropping. There's too much background that isn't of importance here. Probably everything above the roots of the trees should be cropped out. I wouldn't start blurring what's left of the grass, however. There's plenty of blur already. In fact, I think it's odd that in a field of yellow dandelions you chose the one monochromatic thing to focus on and make a color photograph. Not to get too critical, but do you have any better shots from the set? I assume from the way you phrased your question in the post, that you actually understand the technique, or "how to", but that the question is one of application, or when to apply certain effects. In this case, I wouldn't try to artificially enhance the blurred look. Maybe in another shot, but not this one. When using Bokeh in an image, I would generally say go 50/50. No more than 50% blurry stuff in the image. Beyond 50 it's just distracting. Ideally, an image is more like 60/40, with only 40% blurred out, and the majority of the image in sharp relief. Another thing that's distracting (in general terms) is blurred foregrounds. You want to usually try to keep bokeh in the background only, to bring attention to the sharp subject in the foreground.

[jaydesi]

<p>I did do a crop, but I couldn't figure out how to attach more than one image to my post. I cropped out the foreground, but not as much of the treeline as you suggest.<br>

I don't mind criticism, I have a lot to learn, and I'm not going to learn it if people don't either say what's wrong or offer a suggestion to improve the shot.<br>

I took a lot of shots of this dandelion, but I don't really know which ones are "better". I chose this over a yellow dandelion because they were all tight to the ground, and taking a shot straight downward wasn't really appealing to me. I Suppose I could have gone with a small aperture and tried to take in more of the field in detail, and used a wider lens.</p><div></div>

[craig_big]

That's actually really cool, and much more intimate. Do you know how to straighten the horizon? It's noticably off-kilter. In PS, you can use the "measure" tool to draw a line along the horizon. Then, using Image -> Rotate Canvas -> Arbitrary, PS will automatically fill in the exact degrees and rotate it to horizontal. You should do this before cropping, so that you get a fresh look at the picture before your final crop.

[xxloverxx]

<p>Craig, depending on where the photo was made (perhaps on a slope), straightening might not be a good idea.</p>

<p>I think the flower in the cropped version is too far to the right — too much unused space. Just my opinion.</p>

<p>The in-focus strip looks perfectly natural to me, and there's no way to take care of this in-camera unless you use a tilt-shift lens. I would leave it alone — post-processed blur usually looks very different from true OOF areas.</p>

[craig_big]

Sometimes a photo benefits from being artificially rotated, even if the photo was taken on a gentle slope. This photo "looks" off-kilter, regardless of whether or not it "is" off-kilter. For this reason, it should be corrected; not for the sake of 100% realism. This isn't a geographical survey. This is an artistic photograph. If it's meant to look aesthetically pleasing, than any aesthetic suggestions are valid. Rotating it to be pleasing is just as valid as cropping it down to be pleasing. Also, to me, this photograph doesn't indicate that it was taken on a slope. It looks merely as if the photographer's hands were about 3° rotated counter-clockwise at the time of exposure. And I have to make a correction: in PS, it's the "ruler" tool, not the measure tool. Usually, you can get to it by right-clicking the eyedropper.

[gdw]

<p >Jay, you mentioned that you had several photos of this same dandelion and that you are having problems determining which might be best. Do you have one where the blossom itself is in focus? </p>

<p > </p>

<p >The biggest problem with the photo that you posted is not the focus strip or even whether or not it should be cropped or straightened (neither of which makes the photograph interesting, just different)—the problem is that the most interesting element, or at least what should be the most interesting element, in the photograph is not in focus. You are saying to the viewer, well there’s this dandelion but it’s not as important as the grass so I have let it go a little fuzzy but that grass, that’s important. See how sharp I got it. </p>

<p > </p>

<p >The eye of the viewer is going to go first to the sharpest element in a photograph—that is especially true in a photograph that uses such a dramatic contrast between sharp and unsharp as this photograph does. The eye of the viewer wants to see something in the area of sharpness that is interesting and there is just nothing there in this photograph. You have degraded the importance in the dandelion and upgraded the importance of a very, very uninteresting strip of grass. It is the photographer’s responsibility to direct the viewer to the most important element or elements in a photograph and this photograph does not do that. If the dandelion blossom were sharp you would not even notice the portion of the grass that is sharp.</p>

[craig_big]

Point 1: That's not a dandelion blossom. That is a dandelion stem with seeds. The blossom is yellow.

 

Point 2: Dandelion seeds are fuzzy, so a sharp photograph of dandelion seeds is, by its very nature, fuzzy looking. It looks sharp enough to me.

 

Those points aside, you makes good points about the relative importance of the flower and the grass. However, I disagree that the photograph is not interesting. I also think that creating the best possible presentation for a photograph, by appropriately cropping and straightening, gives it the best chance of being perceived in the correct light by the audience. i.e. it gives it the best shot of being interesting. It's not just a mere matter of making things different.

[mike_hitchen]

<p>If you straightened the 'horizon' the 'out of focus' strip would then be at an angle and that would look weird, and the dandelion stem would then be at an angle and maybe look wierd. As long as the main subject (the dandelion and its stem) looks natural then I don't think the 'horizon' is a problem. If the horizon of grass was instead a body of water in teh background then non-horizontal <em>would</em> be weird.</p>