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  • Welcome to the new site. Here's a thread about the update where you can post your feedback, ask questions or spot those nasty bugs!

Salt of the Earth

Rajan Parrikar

pro member
From my photo essay Salt of the Earth.

saltpan.jpg
 

Jerome Marot

Well-known member
This is nice. I like the central composition. I also like the post treatment, contrast and added vignette. One word nevertheless: the sharpening operation degrades the bokeh. You could try to apply a degraded mask before the sharpening, so that only the front part is affected by the operation.
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
I'm enjoying the combination of picture and story to give us a background. There's still time to market the salt!

Asher
 

Rajan Parrikar

pro member
This is nice. I like the central composition. I also like the post treatment, contrast and added vignette. One word nevertheless: the sharpening operation degrades the bokeh. You could try to apply a degraded mask before the sharpening, so that only the front part is affected by the operation.

Jerome,

I agree that the bokeh is slightly jarring, but I am not sure it is the sharpening. Let me take a look again.
 

Rajan Parrikar

pro member
Jerome,

I just reprocessed by applying a mask to the sharpening layer. Can you tell the difference? I don't see anything discernible. The sharpening was gentle to begin with.

I wonder how the Zeiss 100 f/2 MP will render bokeh in a similar situation (i.e. landscape).
 

Joachim Bolte

New member
Very nice picture, only thing I could come up with is that the DOF is VERY shallow, and so the falloff of sharpness is very sudden, within one salt-pan. You could try a 1 or 2 stops higher on the f-number, see how that works to make a more graduate fall-off.

Or did you make the picture unsharp in PP? could you spare us the original?
 

Rajan Parrikar

pro member
Very nice picture, only thing I could come up with is that the DOF is VERY shallow, and so the falloff of sharpness is very sudden, within one salt-pan. You could try a 1 or 2 stops higher on the f-number, see how that works to make a more graduate fall-off.

Or did you make the picture unsharp in PP? could you spare us the original?

The shallow DOF is intentional. The photo was taken at f/1.2 @ 85mm.
 

Jerome Marot

Well-known member
I just reprocessed by applying a mask to the sharpening layer. Can you tell the difference?

Comparison is difficult now that you have removed the first version, but I think that yes. Sharpening, applied to lens blur, tends to give a strange effect. Without sharpening, the unsharp elements sort of fade into the background. With sharpening, there is more something of a "halo" around the elements. In some cases, like parallel lines, it looks as if the lines are doubled. I find this distracting.
 
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