photo advice

[mps9506]

Ok I like this picture I took. Only one out of about 30 or 40 I took of my lawnmower.


I think I made it look grainy though when I processed in irfanview.

One thing I've noticed when I take pictures of fish is that I get little highlights around the fins or small features of the fish like the jawline. What causes this? Is this what is called artifacting?I can resize the picture from the original size down to 800x600 or smaller and you don't really notice it, but I'd like to get rid of this but how?> Is it just the limit of the camera's ability to take photo doing this?
I have an inexpenive canon powershot a75, use a tripod, usually use the timer or change the drive mode to take a series of pictures. I try to use the flash when possible, but sometimes it results in glare, esp. with the black background on my tank.

[mps9506]

I took the original and processed it in PS with unsharp mask filter and auto levels, not sure if it came out any better...
I ran it originally with Travis's reeflife actions and it looked overprocessed to me, like it turned into an oil painting or something.

[Travis]

Second looks a lot better. As far as my actions, people have been having trouble with a few of them working right on their systems. I've actually seen and done it myself, they come out all weird, and I'm not sure how to fix it.

The highlights you're talking about- are they pink or purpl-ish? Or more like a halo? Halo would be artifacting, above mentioned colors a completely different problem.

One of the things you have to watch out for is cropping- I noticed weird sizes on those photos. That's probably a good part of where the graininess is coming from, if you crop and then resize to a bigger size, the grains are magnified along with the rest of the image so they become more noticeable.

T

[mps9506]

I would have to say they are more bluish, I'll post an example when I get home from work tonight.

As far as the cropping, I actually just cut out the un wanted portion to remove the big spotlight that was on the back wall of the aquarium from the flash. I didn't enlarge any part of the photo. I know some of my other photos seemed clearer to me, I think I'm still shooting at iso50, but I guess I should double check.I guess I'll just snap some more shots, not like this blenny is shy or anything. I'm glad to finally have an easy fish target to practice on, almost as easy as corals

[mps9506]

AGH, I just closed the window before my last reply went through...
Anyhow, the highlight is more blue I think. I'll post an example after work.

The pictures were not enlarged at all, I just cropped out the back wall mainly because I have a black background the flash bounces off and looks like I have a big sun right above the blenny. I just basically cropped it out of the photo. I probbaly should have just made the entire background black, but hadn't figured out how to work photoshop yet.

Thx.

[Travis]

image-->adjustments-->auto levels will bring the blacks to where they should be. It won't black out the entire background, but you don't want that anyway.

[reefrunner]

The second shot is much softer which makes it less grainy looking, Over sharpening can give a picture a grainy look and with the high pass sharpening, oversharpening is not as easy to tell cause it doesn't produce contrast halos like USM does.

The blue highlights could be chromatic abberation, on many camera the purple fringing, is blue instead of purple.

As for the levels, auto levels works well in alot of cases...but Travis did a tutorial on manual levels a while back that is pretty helpful and will give good results almost 100% of the time. One thing I notice about the first photo right off...is it's hazy and flat, when looking at the histogram you can see your black point is in the midtones, this can also make noise/grain more visible.

[mps9506]

here is what I was working with. this photo is the uncropped, reduced in size 60%. applied auto levels, then usm contrastII. Then saved for web 70% so I could upload.



Don't worry Travis, I'm not gonna load up the entire RS gallery with pictures of my lawnmower, I'll remove em once I get a grasp of what I should be doing here

I'll upload one of the other pics with the blurriness next.