OK.... one more.

Been organizing literally hundreds of pics from three different cameras for days and just ran into this jaw dropper that I simply had to share.

Bueno!

You have seen the light. Pun intended. Good stuff Doc.

I'll play...








And one that Todd sent me a while back that I put a slight tweak on. Ryley, is this your pic?

OK, I'll try a few. I like to shoot some fairly mono-chromatic color images and silhouttes, which convert pretty well to B&W using the B&W setting in the file menu in photoshop. Usually the contrast needs to be increased somewhat and the black level increase by using the slider.

I did these pretty quickly so they may not be perfect, but I thought I'd take Doc's challenge and post some from Icy Bay north of Yakutat.

Bridge in the fog is MONEY, Twitch!

Awesome Sebastes! Gorgeous.

All dandy, but Mt. St Elias reflection, the coho headshot, and the camp fire

Whoops, I accidentally deleted the campfire shot while editing,

Trying again

My attempts

+1

The nod goes to St Elias for me.

Coley and Sebastes...

What do you guys have to say about the aberration/artifact commonly referred to as "posterization"?

Read a little bit about it in that link you posted for "curves". After seeing the photo example of what posterization actually looks like, I know exactly what they mean.

Now that I have this new HD monitor at the office, I see this "posterization" artifact on a lot of the pics, especially over broad monotone fields like open sky. (Doug's Mt St Elias and Campfire, kwikfix's Angler Looking Skyward, several of Twitch's River in the Fog shots, Coley's Mountaintop shots)

I can look at these same pics on my home computer and do NOT see the same effect. Is this just an artifact of the HD screen or is my old monitor just too dumb to pick it up? Curious to know if any of you have seen the "posterization" effect in an actual printed version of these same pics?

If we're not restricted to fishing photos - here's a few of my favorite B&W's from a trip to Prague a few years ago.

I have noticed the same thing in viewing the one image over a range of monitors or displays. Colors will manifest differently as well as monitors are often calibrated different from one another, if at all.

My first guess is that it is that the posterization you are seeing is more of a factor of the tonal range or some characteristic of your monitor rather than the image it is trying to display. In not knowing much about how monitors and displays work, I suspect that they have some sort of range limit or built in tonal compression of sorts as a matter of efficiency or expense saving, but that is a wild guess really. It could also be a factor of dot pitch.

With regard to differences between computer based viewing and printing, bear in mind that monitors can only display 72 or 96 pixels per inch where as you would need to start at about 300dpi for a decent print.

I have never noticed or had a problem with posterization in any of my prints, but then I don't tend to manipulate curves much if at all and I always print at maximum resolution for the desired print size.

I have however had a problem when creating graphics and effects that feature some sort of a faded appearance or graduated color effect. I used to use a program called Fireworks for web based and printing image manipulation and if I exported an image at a fairly low resolution I would get fairly obvious posterization, particularly in printed form. Very similar to what is shown here:

I admit that I *FAIL* in the picture editing department. So for you experts out there, is there anyway to fix this sumbitch?

Here are a few other Icy Bay shots most by Sebastes.





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Now that was just uncool NoPhish!

Funnier'n'hell, yes.... but definitely uncool.

Bucket's one helluva guy.... an assessment that is echoed by many. I still gotta find a way to get that dude in my boat one of these days.

For some reason a chunk of these photos weren't loading for me earlier.

Twitch, coupla dandy's in that batch dude!

The Prague reflections is pretty stinkin cool as well.

NOFISH, that is pretty terrifying. As for how to fix it, tell bucket to pull his bottom lip over his head and swallow real hard.

Smokes alive SeaDNA.... you've got serious shutter skills!

Doc,

I'm not a really technical photographer, I have always joked that it is a wonder that I could get film inside a camera, now it is what side of the media card do I stick in this thingy door?

Coley hits it pretty well. Monitors, Calibration,over-use of adjustment tools can all effect what you see.

This link will give you an idea about posterization.

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

Keep in mind that what we upload on sites like PP are really low resolution in comparison to the camera output and even more so between using RAW files and 16 bit instead of jpg and 8 bit.

16 bit gives smoother looking files, but does is not available to my knowledge in jpg format.

If you made a legal size paper print of a file as downloaded from your camera on photo paper, it will look much better than a 72ppi image prepared for PP.

Some processing methods are less/more destructive than others.

It is less destructive to use curves, than brightness/contrast on a jpg image.

You want to avoid the jaggies in levels as much as possible.

That is the advantage of shooting and adjusting RAW images over jpg shot files. In actuality, it is pretty hard to see the difference in a printed piece,but RAW gives you much more control without destructing the image.

Take the same jpg image and compare the results using Curves versus
Brightness/Contrast.

I believe you should see no or fewer spikes in the levels after adjusting in curves than brightness/contrast or some of the other adjustment choices, especially the automated ones.


Hope this helps.

BTW,

SEA-DNA looks like he really has the B&W conversion thing right on as well as having nice images.

This has turned out to be a very nice thread.

A few parting shots and I will tap out.

A couple of these were shot in B&W, a few I have just wondered how they would look.




Battle scarred Kasilof Chinark






Glory hole above the Makaroa river, New Zealand.





NW Fork of the Tokositna below Peaks 11,520, 11,530 and Mount Hunter, AK Range. (should see some posterization in this one as it is a low res scan from slide film)







Mount Shuksan from Table Mountain, North Cascades, WA







Hub cap bus reflection, Christchurch, New Zealand.







Mount Foraker Massif from 17,200' on Denali's West Buttress






Flying rat on the way back to the docks, Seward, AK








Dirt jumping at the Whistler Mountain bike park, Whistler, BC








My back yard, the Talkeetna river joins the Big Susitna.





Wind swept tree on Stony Peak, Akaroa, New Zealand.







Back to the land of color for me, I find it much more...Grand!