Playing with my camera - any critques ?

[sanjay]

 

[Frankie]

wonderful shots
frankie

 

[Ben1]

Looks good Sanjay! What kind of camera is it?

 

[Anonymous]

I can tell from the grain you were shooting at a higher ISO (800 or 1600?), but the photos themselves are fantastic. Are these in that big reef you put together in the PSU union?

 

[sanjay]

I was wondering about the slight graininess too. I was shooting at ISO 400. Am wondering if the graininess is due to post processing - conversion to gif etc.

There are from my tank at home.

Ben, I am using a Nikon d-70, with a 105 micro lens.

sanjay.

 

[Anonymous]

Ohhhh yeah, I hadn't noticed they were gifs. That would definitely introduce the graininess.

 

[Anonymous]

Nice

 

[Len]

Never convert to gifs There are a zillion problems with this format used to display detailed images. The shots look fine to me otherwise 8)

 

[Len]

Oh, and Frankie:
:welcome:

You're the same Frankie as the one in the chatroom, right? Glad you've found your way to the BB

 

[Wampatom]

Hello Sanjay:
Both pictures are quite nice. The blue tang is particularly striking. Here is what I would do to enhance it: 1) Since it is already cropped I would crop even tighter; 2) I would sharpen after you resize using unsharp mask in photoshop. 3) I would darken the background. I tried all three on the picture, I will admit they were less effective than I expected, but I think they still made an improvement.
Wampatom

 

[sanjay]

Hello Sanjay:
Both pictures are quite nice. The blue tang is particularly striking. Here is what I would do to enhance it: 1) Since it is already cropped I would crop even tighter; 2) I would sharpen after you resize using unsharp mask in photoshop. 3) I would darken the background. I tried all three on the picture, I will admit they were less effective than I expected, but I think they still made an improvement.
Wampatom

Wampton:

Yes, they definately made an improvement. A few questions on what you did with photoshop and how you did it

1) What parameters do you recommend for the unsharpen filter

2) How did you go about darkening the background. ?

I guess I am going to have invest time in learning Photoshop now too !!! Wish I had the time.

sanjay.

 

[Wampatom]

Sharpening
I sharpen as the very last step. Resize first. I generally use radius of 0.3, percent of 200%, and threshold of 3. If this is too severe I reduce to % to say 150. If I use stronger sharpening I only do it on part of the photo using layers.

Darkening the background
I find photoshop to be counter intuitive. I have used many powerful software programs but I find photoshop gets the award for being obscure. I suspect graphic artists don’t think like engineers. Because of this, I have worked out a few commands that work well for me. There are many ways to do everything. I always work with layers. Here I created a duplicate layer. I darkened background layer until I was happy with it without any regard to what happened to the fish. I then used a mask on the top layer to let the new background show through. This allows fine adjustment on the mask until all looks good. Then combine layers and sharpen.