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Dvir Barkay
02-15-2014, 02:33 AM
http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5544/12535225734_7ca163f342_o.png

The last of the suns rays peek out from behind a distant rock face over the wilderness of Valley of Fire State Park. It was a good trek in the desert to get there but it was well worth it. Its winter so the sun casts a very different and much softer light than had this been taken in the summer.

Sony A100, Raw, Sony 16-50/2.8, 16mm, F/9, 1/125s, ISO 100

Diane Miller
02-15-2014, 04:25 PM
Wonderful! Great tonalities, especially as brought out in the shady areas of the rock, great light, great sunburst! There is some posterization in the sky -- did that happen when you made the JPEG? Working in 16 bits in PS should allow a smooth gradient.

Dvir Barkay
02-15-2014, 04:35 PM
Is this any better?
http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3809/12548175745_8d1db54e82_o.png

Its something to do with the way photoshop is saving it, there is nothing wrong with the sky in the regular image, not sure why its doing that.

Diane Miller
02-15-2014, 04:43 PM
Looks the same to me. Then I pulled it into PS and see it's a PNG file. Very limited tonal range in them -- intended for web page graphics. Save as a JPEG and you'll probably be fine.

Dvir Barkay
02-15-2014, 04:46 PM
Very very lightly, its there so its not just your monitor, for me its extremely light, not sure why its doing it.

Diane Miller
02-15-2014, 04:52 PM
I found out what it is and was editing my post as you posted -- see just above.

Dvir Barkay
02-15-2014, 04:58 PM
Ok Jpeg at 100% quality.

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7317/12549084074_b27b614e69_o.jpg
I personally find PNG24 to be quite good for images, I always find Jpegs compress my sharpening too much. Does it look better to you?

Diane Miller
02-15-2014, 05:04 PM
I'm out of my depth on the differences -- I always thought the conventional wisdom was that PNG (I don't know a 24 from anything else) had limited colors. Maybe something has changed over the years that I missed.

I'd just ask this, out of curiosity -- If you did the conversion as a JPEG is the posterization still there?

Other here can answer better, I'm sure, and I don't mean to get your thread off track.

Diane Miller
02-15-2014, 05:07 PM
When I open it in PS it also says the PNG format doesn't support embedded profiles. That can cause a lot of variation (none of it good) in how people see images in a browser.

See a sticky at the top of the ETL forum.

Dvir Barkay
02-15-2014, 05:08 PM
I did the conversion in jpeg its right above your post :S3: thats why I asked if you think it looks better?

Diane Miller
02-15-2014, 05:14 PM
Sorry, I missed that -- thought I had dragged the second one but apparently got the first one. NOW I see you wrote that in the post.

They're the same for posterization -- would be interesting to see where it came from but still a very lovely image!!

And the pitfalls of no profile is something to be aware of.

Dvir Barkay
02-15-2014, 05:23 PM
Thanks, yeah I am not sure why this is happening. Funny thing is that it has happened to me before with images with clouds that had no posterization when in regular TIFF or Raw format. Yet when I down sampled and saved, all of a sudden there was annoying posterization. I am certainly no expert on this so hopefully someone that knows how to correct this can help. Thanks Diane for all the help!

Diane Miller
02-15-2014, 06:03 PM
The posterization would have to come from going to an 8 bit image. It would only show (be perceptible) in certain gradients where there aren't many tonal levels.

dankearl
02-17-2014, 02:22 AM
I like the scene and the sunburst, (they seem to be the "in" device in Landscape photography this year).
One easy fix to posterization for web presentation in plain blue skies like this is to use some Gaussion blur to smooth it out.

Diane Miller
02-17-2014, 09:38 PM
Thanks, yeah I am not sure why this is happening. Funny thing is that it has happened to me before with images with clouds that had no posterization when in regular TIFF or Raw format. Yet when I down sampled and saved, all of a sudden there was annoying posterization. I am certainly no expert on this so hopefully someone that knows how to correct this can help. Thanks Diane for all the help!

Here's some useful information on posterization -- I started to try to write it out then found this:

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/posterization.htm

Dvir Barkay
02-18-2014, 09:38 AM
Yeah thanks for that. I know why it happens already kind of, its just I am frustrated why it appears so much compared to what I see in my Tiff files, which have none of it.

Morkel Erasmus
02-26-2014, 04:56 AM
Nice composition and scene Dvir. Good use of the sunburst as well.
I might have liked to see the rock face on the RHS (directly to the right of the sunburst) to be a tad darker (and I do mean very sligthly).
Posterization is always more pronounced in clear-blue-sky images, why I'm not qualified to say. I've also never saved as PNG so don't ask me about that either (apparently they say PNG is best for Facebook posting as well due to lesser compression used).