A U2 4 29

ghinson

"No Line on the Horizon"

I know a girl who's like the sea
I watch her changing every day for me
...

One day she's still, the next she swells
You can hear the universe in her sea shells
...

...no line on the horizon...



Any thoughts? Can you tell this is a quiet bay at sunrise with fog obscuring the horizon?

KevXman

I like it! There seems to be some color noise around the glow on the bottom though. Great capture.
— Kevin

whiterice

This is nice....simple, yet powerful. I really like it!

Katmitchell

Amazing...

Very creative shot and you did well at capturing the title of the song...

I do see the magenta noise as Kevin mentioned. I would try to clean that up, I can't remember if you use PS or Gimp. I think you mentioned that once, but I cannot remember..

Awesome job here, very competitive indeed..

Kat

ghinson

I use PS. To process this pic, all I did was tweak Curves a bit to enhance the contrast. I cannot see the color noise. I'm sure it's there. It might be my monitor. How would you use PS to correct this? Any suggestions?

Katmitchell

Now someone else may be able to give you better advice.

Here is my take on it..

Without a noise reduction plugin, I think your only course of action here is to go with a black and white conversion to eliminate it. This is why.. You could use selective color to pull the magenta out, however, you end up basically de-saturating it to a black and white anyways because there are so many red tones in the browns and tans.

Also, with the amount of noise and blooming here the black and white conversion tool will only pull that out more, so this is how I would go about it..

Go to Image> Adjustments > Photo Filter and make the color of the filter black and then crank the density up all the way. This way you are not further disturbing the pixels.

The other way is to start fresh and obtain the contrast you want without curves. I notice that curves increases the noise of a photo as well as digital blooming when I do it too, so you have to be careful, perhaps try levels instead.

The only other methods are to use a blur layer or PS noise reduction, but I don't think it will be strong enough to fix this problem and using blur is going to cause you to lose your birds out there because they are so small.

One question,, what level of JPEG compression are you using when you save from RAW to JPEG?

Kat

nightpixels

ghinson wrote:

I use PS. To process this pic, all I did was tweak Curves a bit to enhance the contrast. I cannot see the color noise. I'm sure it's there. It might be my monitor. How would you use PS to correct this? Any suggestions?

I don't see the noise being too much of issue here, but if you don't have a noise reduction software and would like to reduce the noise in Photoshop, one technique that some people use is duplicate your image layer in Photoshop say 4 or 5 times. When you are done with this step, you will basically have 4 or 5 copies of the same image stacked up on top of each other, then start setting the opacity level of each image as follows:

The very bottom layer : 100% (of course)
2nd from bottom: 50% (100 * 1/2)
3rd from bottom: 33% (100 * 1/3)
4th from bottom: 25% (100 * 1/4)
the very top one: 20% (100 * 1/5)

This way the noises will average out to a sum that is smaller than the noise in each image. Bottom line is that the opacity of the images going from the bottom layer to the top layer need to follow this sequence:

100 * (1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, 1/6, ..., 1/n) where n = total number of copies of the original image.

I use noise ninja to reduce noise which does a better job than the method above.

Again, I do not see a glaring noise problem in your image (at least on my monitor).

Good photo!

ic4u

nightpixels wrote:

I don't see the noise being too much of issue here, but if you don't have a noise reduction software and would like to reduce the noise in Photoshop, one technique that some people use is duplicate your image layer in Photoshop say 4 or 5 times. When you are done with this step, you will basically have 4 or 5 copies of the same image stacked up on top of each other, then start setting the opacity level of each image as follows:

The very bottom layer : 100% (of course)
2nd from bottom: 50% (100 * 1/2)
3rd from bottom: 33% (100 * 1/3)
4th from bottom: 25% (100 * 1/4)
the very top one: 20% (100 * 1/5)

This way the noises will average out to a sum that is smaller than the noise in each image. Bottom line is that the opacity of the images going from the bottom layer to the top layer need to follow this sequence:

100 * (1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, 1/6, ..., 1/n) where n = total number of copies of the original image.

I use noise ninja to reduce noise which does a better job than the method above.

Again, I do not see a glaring noise problem in your image (at least on my monitor).

Good photo!

And this is why I can no longer help my boys with their math homework....geez louise

Great photo...perfect title!

Katmitchell

nightpixels wrote:

I don't see the noise being too much of issue here, but if you don't have a noise reduction software and would like to reduce the noise in Photoshop, one technique that some people use is duplicate your image layer in Photoshop say 4 or 5 times. When you are done with this step, you will basically have 4 or 5 copies of the same image stacked up on top of each other, then start setting the opacity level of each image as follows:

The very bottom layer : 100% (of course)
2nd from bottom: 50% (100 * 1/2)
3rd from bottom: 33% (100 * 1/3)
4th from bottom: 25% (100 * 1/4)
the very top one: 20% (100 * 1/5)

This way the noises will average out to a sum that is smaller than the noise in each image. Bottom line is that the opacity of the images going from the bottom layer to the top layer need to follow this sequence:

100 * (1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, 1/6, ..., 1/n) where n = total number of copies of the original image.

I use noise ninja to reduce noise which does a better job than the method above.

Again, I do not see a glaring noise problem in your image (at least on my monitor).

Good photo!

Never heard of that method before, interesting.. your so mathematical Allen that your making my head spin..huhD

Katmitchell

Hmm.. Looks like some see the noise and others don't.. I know Miss Diva has a calibrated monitor so you might hit her up for some review.

Mine is calibrated but only with a digital walk through.. I think hers is fully calibrated..

I see all kinds of pink/ magenta banding and digital bloom right below and through the birds out there. Not a ton of it, but I do see some...

So give it time to see what others say, it "may not" be noticeable enough to worry about..

Kat

nightpixels

Katmitchell wrote:

Hmm.. Looks like some see the noise and others don't.. I know Miss Diva has a calibrated monitor so you might hit her up for some review.

Mine is calibrated but only with a digital walk through.. I think hers is fully calibrated..

I see all kinds of pink/ magenta banding and digital bloom right below and through the birds out there. Not a ton of it, but I do see some...

Kat

You know this is totally possible, because sometimes I work on an image to make it look the way I want it to on my home Apple Cinema Monitor but then when I view it on a dell PC monitor, it looks different. One thing that can definitely cause this banding thing you are talking about is if your monitor is set at 16 bit color, not 32. I'm sure there could be other reasons for it, but that is the first thing I would check.

dnie

first off, mine is not calibrated.
I think I see what the others are talking about... not sure though. To me it looks great.

dnie

nightpixels wrote:

You know this is totally possible, because sometimes I work on an image to make it look the way I want it to on my home Apple Cinema Monitor but then when I view it on a dell PC monitor, it looks different. One thing that can definitely cause this banding thing you are talking about is if your monitor is set at 16 bit color, not 32. I'm sure there could be other reasons for it, but that is the first thing I would check.

whoa... it has horrible banding in 16 bit.! what a difference!

Katmitchell

Thanks for mentioning that.....I double checked.. I am at 32 bit... however I am on a very wide flat screen, maybe that has something to do with it? I dunno..

nightpixels

Katmitchell wrote:

Thanks for mentioning that.....I double checked.. I am at 32 bit... however I am on a very wide flat screen, maybe that has something to do with it? I dunno..

I am on a 30" wide screen too, so I'm not sure

ghinson

I looked at it in B&W. Looks OK (especially using the Gorman B&W action) but I think it looses some of its depth. I tried altering the White Balance, just to see the differences. New colors. I'll prep a couple of post for cc.

ghinson

This is a tricky one in LR/PS. Not sure where the noise is coming from. Or the banding. The original just had a LR auto tone, the white balance was set to auto as well. I did move the Clarity slider a little, wanting to bring out the water ripples a bit. I adjusted for minor vignetting. Then in PS, I used Curves, very minimally to bring out the contrast. I did then use the Landscape setting on Imagenomics Noiseware Pro plugin.

In the one I posted below, I left it SOOC, took it in to PS. Did not see the banding. I think the slight color around the sun glows was still there, but I think that was natural to the shot. I decreased the Vibrancy slider a bit, and lost color. But then decided to go ahead and try it as a B&W. Different feel to it this way.

So, couple of questions. Where did my noise come from in the original? How's it look as B&W?

richtersl

I looked at this at home late last night and at work and I don't see any color noise or banding. The color on this monitor is set to 32 bit.

It's a lovely shot and your song selection fits it to a tee. This is definitely a "color" shot. The B&W kills that morning feel and it does seem to lose some depth. I like what you've done so far but am curious to see what your alternate color versions will look like. :lurk

ghinson

I agree. B&W just loses something.

And I don't see the color noise either. I have to confess a little ignorance using the Noiseware plugin. I generally just use its default settings (Landscape, Default, Night Scene, etc) instead of playing with the actual Color and Noise sliders.

I have PS auto convert and save to non-compressed 16-bit TIFF files. So it shouldn't be a jpeg issue (though I'm not sure what happens to these TIFF files when I upload them to my smugmug gallery, what they're displayed as, what they're delivered as when I "Get the Link" to paste here.

I'll play with the colors this evening.

Katmitchell

I don't think you can upload a TiFF to smugmug.. I may be wrong, but I think I tried that once, and it did not work, you may want to check that..

hmm.. well if so few of us are seeing the color banding perhaps it is not an issue you need to worry about..

I agree it loses something in the Black and White conversion..

Kat

travelways

Wow.... what a beauty!!!
:jawdrop

Kinkajou

This one had crossed my mind, but I wondered about it because the only thing I could come up with was replicating the album cover... sooo... I wonder whether it might be prudent to check with the 'powers that be' to ensure that it is an acceptable entry.

Very well executed, though... I really like the shot!

ghinson

Hmmm. I don't think this looks anything like the album cover. You can actually see a line on the horizon in the album cover.

My concern about the photo (other then the color noise that I cannot see, and therefore cannot remove) is that I feel like it is more of a literal interpretation of the song title. No line on the horizon --> no line on the horizon. I kinda hoped to do more then just represent the song title. Maybe take a picture that further represents the whole lyric.

Though reading the contest thread, it sounds like the song title is our aim. So I think this will be my entry.

Kinkajou

Alright, that's cool Just wouldn't want a fellow dgrinner to get DQ'ed