Andrew Fildes wrote:
> I was concerned that this may have been me messing with the image and matters
> of personal taste. I find your last two with recovered shadow detail to be
> rather flat for my taste and I worried that I may have been using the
> Lightroom slider for blacks a bit too enthusiastically for yours.
Not at all. You made only a tiny change. But I have replaced "original"
with the real original. :-)
> I do like to see real black in an image. The sun was bright that day and
> these white trunks do look very pale in life.
>
I too like some real balck in an image. I'm much more likely to decide
to let some shadow detail go than highlight detail, in the interest of
an image that looks good to me.
The point of the exercise was to see how much H&S detail was available.
I wasn't clear about that. I've added a title to that effect. Images 2 &
3 are indeed too flat for my taste. The point is about choice, my
decision about how to treat them, not the camera's
> I checked the original image and this is what the jpeg looks like with no
> fiddling whatsoever - looks like I hardly touched it in the previous.
> http://www.pbase.com/afildes/image/109309451
> The detail on the trunk is there but is not very distinct in sunny conditions
> - these trees shed to white or grey new bark.
We have lots of eucalypts here that do that; not the same species, I
guess, but a very similar effect. Nonetheless, I think the human eye
picks up more detail in the bright portion than did the camera, at least
as interpreted by the JPEG processor. Because only the center portion of
our visual field is sharp, we view detail in an entire scene as a series
of small areas. In the process, we also can adjust "brightness", by
adjusting the aperture and the chemistry of the sensor, to see the
detail in each area more clearly. That's one reason I don't feel I'm
necessarily being "unreal" when I treat a bright area, as the trunk
here, differently from the rest of a scene. The camera 'sees' everything
at once, at one level of detail and one exposure, and is in that way,
different from our eyes.
> The detail is also there in the shadows but on my Cinema display, your
> recovery of the details behind the trunk looks very flat, grey and
> underexposed. I may have gone too contrasty but I think you're too far the
> other way.
>
I agree. It was an exercise. I've now added my own version, at least as
I would do it today - so folks can at least disagree with me, and not an
exercise. :-) I still like to retain a fair amount of detail in the
trunk. Whether true to life, whatever that means, or not, I much prefer
it to the largely undifferentiated blob in the original. Fortunately, it
is finally raining here, so I can't go out and look at a freshly
stripped trunk in sunlight.
For me, the story is in the trunk and the stuff at the bottom. So I let
the background go, which deemphasizes it, and added some LCE and
sharpening to bring up detail detail/texture and local tonal contrast in
the bottom area and I let some shadow detail go black there as well.
<http://www.moosemystic.net/Gallery/Others/Fildes/Trunk.htm>
Moose
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