Commons:Photography critiques/July 2009

July

Nodding trillium

I think this turned out pretty well, but I'm no photographer. Critiques? Fungus Guy (talk) 22:19, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

Chevrolet Apache

What can be done to improve this image? Can somebody please explain the following review in-depth? "Chromatic Aberration, and clutter background" Thank you, Rastaman3000 (talk) 18:06, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

Chromatic aberration is a certain kind of problem with focusing of colors. The problem happens in the lens. If you focus exactly on one color, a different color is not in focus. Some people use the same words to describe purple fringing that happens in the camera's sensor or processor. One place it sometimes appears is at a sharp edge, and when you look at the photo you see some color that was not really there in the original scene. See en:Chromatic aberration, especially the Photography section. You can ask the person who reviewed your picture where the chromatic aberration is a problem, and which kind of chromatic aberration he or she meant.

When the purpose of a photo is to illustrate one thing, other things in the picture are called "clutter." The person who reviewed your picture said that the clutter is in the background. Probably that means the bikes, people, wall, and building. To make that reviewer happy, take a new picture with the simplest background possible. Some people use a beach or an overlook where the background is far away or a blank wall. If you can move the truck far away from the background, and make the background is way out of focus but keep the truck is in focus, that helps concentrate people's attention on the truck when they look at the picture. A background that has almost no detail (either by being out of focus, or by being a thing like a plain white wall that has no details), low contrast, and no color or a color that doesn't distract people from looking at the truck, may make the person who reviewed your picture happier. Of course, don't put clutter in the foreground or the same distance as the truck either. Fg2 (talk) 02:47, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

Thank you very much for your detailed explanation. Rastaman3000 (talk) 18:17, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

Suggestions for amendment

I stitched this 360° pano from 32 single images. As I didn't use a tripod the result is maybe not the best. I'm not too happy with the appearance of the sky in the right part but that's what it looked like that day. So if you have any suggestions how to improve this image or how to make better panos in the future, you're welcome to tell me. Or do you think, this pano meets the criterias for quality images? --тнояsтеn ⇔ 21:35, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

The clouds at the right look like they have quite a few blown highlights. Overexposure happens very easily when one uses a camera panoramic mode. And the horizon looks wavy to me, minimum of the sine wave about one third from the left. The latter one you can fix on your computer. For the overexposure problem, unless it was introduced during the stitch, one needs to retake the photos, preferably with some small underexposure. And looking at the path one third from right, I see some parts out of focus. Hence third recommendation: make sure the camera focuses ok, better set it to manual focus. As a backup, take >50% overlap, then one missing photo does not spoil a whole panoramic set. Good luck, this definitively is a nice view. -- Klaus with K (talk) 16:14, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your comment. I'll try to work on the horizon if I find time the next days. Concerning focus and overexposure, I have to say that my equipment is far from professional as I use a Canon Digital IXUS 80 IS and as I said before the pictures were shot without using a tripod. But I try to get the best out of it ;-) --тнояsтеn ⇔ 20:35, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

Does anyone know why thumbs of a file can look ugly sometimes?

Uh? The quality of this photo is set 100%, so why?

I uploaded some files today, and I'm wondering why this photo looks ugly at low resolution... I've done basic (and lossless) photo manipulation and I get this result. Does anyone know why? The DNG (RAW) file is provided if you think you can edit it to make it look a bit better... Thank you in advance. →Diti the penguin —

Regardless of the original compression setting, the Mediawiki software applies rather aggressive JPEG compression when generating low-resolution copies, and the JPEG format is an inherently poor choice for compressing images with smooth gradients, if preserving those gradients is any sort of priority. Have you tried uploading it as PNG? —LX (talk, contribs) 22:16, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

Thank you, you have a point, about the gradient thing. Once I upload the PNG version, what template should I put on it to say to comers from Wikipedia through the PNG version: “hey, this file is too big, check the JPEG there”? I've found out {{JPEG version of PNG}}, but that's for the other way around. PS: Someone already put my image(s) on our Wikipedia, I guess it'll be a problem already if visitors want to reuse it. →Diti the penguin — 22:53, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

I wasn't even aware of {{JPEG version of PNG}}, but through Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:JPEG version of PNG, I found {{PNG with JPEG version}}, which seems to be what you're looking for. —LX (talk, contribs) 15:39, 15 July 2009 (UTC)