Border Town Jail

The original of a previous B&W submission.

Doug-- Great image. The black and white has a real zing to it because of your treatment and the extreme light you've given it. The black and white treatment seems harmonious and goes with the image well. Here, although you've fiddled around with the colors and gotten some interesting contrasts going, it feels a little more "faked" to me. The sky in particular doesn't feel in harmony with the lighting of the rest of the shot. The black and white, while obviously manipulated, has a consistency and makes sense to me. This one looks nice and dazzling but loses the effect pretty quickly. One thing that keeps bothering me is the pixellation along the border betwen the sky and the land and building. It makes it very obvious that stuff was done in photoshop to see a transition edge stand out so much like that. All that said, it is a wonderful image that I think could stand quite well in color on its own with much less manipulation. Hope you don't mind the extensive critique. OK? --Fred

Not at all, Fred. I'm still in the early stages of digital, and always trying some new utility. I really didn't do much to this though. The sky was polarized in the original, and I just added a bit of saturation. I'll attach the original.

I was trying a new tool that is supposed to remove any compression artifacts, but I can't really see them until I enlarge about 400%. Let me know if you can see them on the original. Maybe I can figure out where the problem is, other than my vision problems. I didn't do anything to the other shot, but crop 1/4 inch off the left border and most of the darkened/polarized sky.

Hey Doug. Yeah, I do see it in the original and at this size. If you follow along the bottom edge of the sky, against the earth, rocks, and structure, there's a digital outline, somewhat irregular. Haven't work much with polarizing filters so don't know if that would cause it. Could probably be smoothed out with careful use of the clone and blur tools. What kind of camera are you using? As for the saturation, that does feel like quite a bit of saturation to me, but that's really a matter of taste. I tend to go lightly on the colors. The one that stands out to me the most is the burnt orange to the right of the jail. But, again, a lot of folks like that look and I leave that up to you. To me, for instance, the original color of the jail has that very southwestern earthtone/adobe look. Here it looks a little like a colorized movie might. Love the shadows you caught on the jail and love the whole feel of this shot.

Wow - the sky really is that colour! Amazing! I like this shot - the shadows on the wall add a real graphic quality to it. And pair that with all the rocks, it makes almost an abstract of textures. Nice!

I have a strange question. Does your camera have a setting on it that turns it to a different colorization like chrome? Something weird like that? I know some silly camera's have silly settings like that that can go straight to a disk to have printed that look fine when printed but NOT fine to work on in any digital aspects. Also if you are trying to treat this like a RAW picture it can mess it up. (so I am told). WEIRD. It just looks like this is in a chrome look almost. hmmm

 

Just weird pixels. Hmm

 

Let me think on it and see what I can figure out in my brain. Sometimes I get smart.

No wierd settings. There are a number of Parameter settings for specific subjects but I have only used one. If you looked at the original attachment you'll see I've only added a bit of saturation. I'm more inclined to think it's over sharpenend. Shouldn't be on the original though. I'll have to check again if it is the original

After two days of puzzling over these shots I think I've found the problem.

Since no artifacts are evident on the originals, or the ones with contrast,sharpen and some saturation added, it only shows up after I resize them for submission. I've just been using the Microsoft Power Toy Resizer that I use for emails, and the compression artifacts are most evident, as is the bleeding of colours along some colour lines. I haven't tried the bicubic resampling yet but expect it will solve the problem.

Sorry I didn't think of that myself. I've actually been experiencing a lot more of that compression problem myself lately. It doesn't seem to show up as much in closeup portraits and black and white, which is mostly what I do, but the color photos I've done, especially if there's a little more detail where colors are intersecting, seem to be a problem. Photoshop has a "save-for-the-web" feature, which seems to be quite helpful in a lot of cases in keeping these artifacts to a minimum. Then, of course, there's never knowing if everyone else's monitor is calibrated as one's own and who knows what colors everyone else is seeing?! Give me a gallery with prints on the wall any day.

Hi Doug! I see you have been talking about settings on the camera....and I see the original one which btw I see not much diference with the post :) this image is amazing in colors, very clean and wonderful saturation, also the lines shadows on the wall and angle makes this really GREAT!

 

Nice to see your job :)