Monday 14 January 2008

Reworking old material

As I've been working through my Wiltshire series I've been working on a couple of improvements to my workflow. The first is about using black and white to work on tonal adjustments (as I mentioned here) the second is a more refined local enhancement. The latter is revealing more detail in images and yielding some that require no output sharpening at all. I'll probably go into more detail in this at another time.

As for now, I decided to go back to one of my favourite shots of the last 12 months but one that did not print well.

Fallen tree, Stourhead, April 2007

Here is the original I created. Too dark, a lot of detail lost and a really disappointing print. I do, however, really like the subject and composition.

So I decided to put my new workflow to the test, including more advanced sharpening. Here is the result.

Fallen tree, Stourhead, April 2007
This is now the 4th incarnation


This is much improved, it enlarges well, retains far more detail and should result in a great print even at 18".

3 comments:

  1. I Martin,
    I can't really tell how it will look on paper, but from the jpegs I think you may have gone a bit over the top with the sharpening and burning. I actually think the old one looks better on screen.

    If the jpeg you're showing is the one prepared for print, and not screen, it may well be just fine. After all, an image prepared for paper almost always looks a bit overdone on screen.

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  2. Kjell Harald, looking from work, I see what you mean. Obviously you can't see the difference in an 18" print from a small web version either.

    I'll put together another post to better show the differences.

    I've got so used to translating my on-screen to a print view that I can "lose" the view of the on-screen version.

    As you can probably tell from this and earlier posts, I struggle a bit with on-screen & web optimisation.

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  3. You're not alone...

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