Main subject not sharp.............

Hi everyone...I am a new member and have had no luck getting my photos accepted.......here are a couple of the pics....The Saudi 747SP baffels me,its seem very sharp.......Any suggestions? Thank you very much,George

Attached photos:

the image seems really compressed, only 235KB isnt a lot for an image of 1200px size, what do you save your photos at when you have finished editing them?

Thanks for the reply...Not being super tech savy...the original Saudi photo started out 2533x1770 at 743kb and after editing and resizing to keep it under the 1600 size,it came out like this...I use pixseizer to get to that size.......Iam sure Iam not doing something right or maybe the wrong program?.....Is their a better way?or the right way? Any help would be greatly appreciated! thanks again,George..................................

The dead give away is the high contrast colour boundaries, take the fuselage FedEx for example. The dark blue and the white is high contrast so the line between them should be distinct and crisp, which it is not.

Sometimes it is better to start with a high value sharpening, look for the halo or jagged lines (signs of over sharpening) and then reduce the sharpening until the halo or jagges disappear. You should be able to turn the sharpening on and off so you can see the difference that it makes.

Another part of the FedEx image problem is it is slightly over exposed, which is also not good for sharpening.

I do not use Smart Sharpen but a setting of 100% and Radius seems to work for the Saudi B747, you have to be careful with over sharpening the FedEx B727 as too much will create a halo (try it and see) around the letters in Express. A smart setting of something like 30 and radius 0,5 seems to work.

There are only guides.

George, get yourself a copy of Photoshop Elements or GIMP (it's free) and use that. Photoshop has the advantage of being an industry standard with plenty of tutorials for learners to use. GIMP is more progressive and has all the features of Photoshop for nothing although there is not too much out there in the way of tutorials.

Use the Image resize, and Bicubic and I would suggest an image size of 1024 or 1200 for a beginner as you can get away with more at that size than 1500 pixels. ;)

Darry's point about how much the image is compressed is a valid one, you have a limit of 900kb which ensure the best quality for your image.

This post has been edited by Wallace Shackleton on 29th May 2012 - 20:27

Thank you so much for the info...I have Photoshop Elements 8 so I will work with that . I really appreciate the help ,George

Try this for starters George.

http://forums.airplane-pictures.net/index.php?/topic/508-resize-images-in-elements/

With Photoshop Elements try Unsharp Mask with settings of 50_0.2_0. You can apply gentle sharpening by using the keys Ctrl+F until jaggies appear and then go back one step by using the keycode Ctrl+Z.

Try to standardise your work flow. A simple workflow could be ....

1. Set horizon level.

2. Crop to size.

3. Equalise to find any dust spots and clone them out.

4. Open up the histogram and adjust the baseline left and right arrows to come in to touch each end of the graph. (adjusts the contrast)

5. Progressively sharpen as described above.

6. Save at the highest resolution possible (12 in Photoshop). You may have to come down to 11 to keep below the image size rules of Airplane-Pictures.

Ctrl + F repeats the last filter command. Repeated use of the sharpen command could induce noise into the picture. At times Unsharp Mask can be a curse.

One thing to bear in mind is to remember that there is no one setting for sharpening, each picture has to be treated on its own merits.

Personally, if I only used Elements then I would almost exclusively use a sharpened layer mask and use the erase tool to selectively rub or control the sharpening in the picture.

I find it very interesting indeed that I see so many people say each individual image needs to be treated on its own merits yet whether I'm taking a photo of a plane, or a long exposure of the inside of a dark concert arena, or an iceberg in the middle of some rather cold water, or my cat in my bedroom, all my images have almost exactly the same sharpening applied and it works perfectly 99% of the time on every single one of them.

I never really understand how people's images can differ so much on an individual basis, that just indicates an inconsistency in your technique to me. :/

This post has been edited by Paul Nichols on 5th June 2012 - 02:59

It is down to your own technique that sharpening does not vary but it should be done on a case by case basis in case the image is not properly sharpened.

Sharpening works by increasing the edge contrast between two colours, no two colours are the same and no two lighting conditions are the same, so sharpening does vary from picture to picture, otherwise Photoshop would have one button marked "Sharpen" and every one would use it. There would never be any more no soft edges nor any halos or jagged edges in anyone's pictures.

Please don't take this personally because it isn't intended as such, I'm just interested in your approach. If what you're saying worked then your most recent image wouldn't be jaggy and your second to most recent upload wouldn't be soft. This is what I mean by inconsistency. If you were treating each image differently with the ultimate aim of achieving uniform sharpness then there wouldn't be such inconsistencies in your images; there are quite dramatic inconsistencies between those two images so something somewhere in your approach isn't working.

This post has been edited by Paul Nichols on 5th June 2012 - 20:57

I totally agree with Wallace and would even say that it does not only depend on the light conditions or the colours but also on many other parameters;

Would you apply the same sharpening method and amount to an image shot with a prime 400 and another shot coming from some low cost lens ? Definitely not.

Would you also apply the same treatment to a picture taken at aperture 2.8 and another taken at the 7 or 11 ? Once again, I don't think so ...

Of course that's my opinion and I can be wrong ...

Murmeldeier, with respect I think you're totally missing the point of the quality versus low cost lens argument. If a lens inherently isn't all that sharp then NO amount of sharpening is going to fix it. I actually do sharpen largely the same for cheap lenses as I do my L series lenses because I know the values I use work, the only difference is the better lenses can generally resolve more detail than the cheaper ones. From that it's fairly logical, to me at least, that the same sharpening on both lenses will simply give better results from the better lens. Trying to sharpen a kit lens to make it look like an L lens will just result in a seriously crappy looking image. We all know that.

Plus, if the technique of sharpening each image differently works then why are Wallace's so inconsistent? If that technique works then they'd all be absolutely spot on but they're not, there are huge variations in the quality of the sharpening. You can't convince me that a technique works when the results say otherwise! At the end of the day we can sit here spouting whatever rubbish we want about how good our techniques are or how bad we consider other people's to be, in the end nothing we say here matters one iota. The images we take, edit and upload are the ultimate measure of how well our techniques work and they alone are what we should use to judge them by.

This post has been edited by Paul Nichols on 6th June 2012 - 23:55