African Fish eagle - Halo to wings

[John Harper]

Hi

Just looking for a bit more advice on this whole sharpening thing. Shot i took today of "Othello" an African Fish Eagle catching some food in flight. I have run the file through Nicolas's sharpening routine, and i notice a sort of "halo" (probably the wrong word) above his wings.

I don't know if its the sharpening or the fact i pulled the highlight contrast down in RAW Shooter when i converted to a TIFF image. Anyway any advice would be appreciated in my long and tortuous journey to competence in the digital darkroom

John

 

[nicolas claris]

Hi John

as I am on Mac, I have no experience with RAW Shooter.

2 comments:
when you run the action, you may either erase/feather a part of the image or apply a smaller percentage of the top layer...
In fact the action does add a bit of contrasts this is certainly why you get halos on an already strong contrasted image...
IMHO

can you post the original so we could give it a try, maybe with the new version of the action...

 

[John Harper]

Hi John

as I am on Mac, I have no experience with RAW Shooter.

2 comments:
when you run the action, you may either erase/feather a part of the image or apply a smaller percentage of the top layer...
In fact the action does add a bit of contrasts this is certainly why you get halos on an already strong contrasted image...
IMHO

can you post the original so we could give it a try, maybe with the new version of the action...

Hi Nicolas

Original image from the RAW file without the highlight contrast pulled right down and no sharpening

John

 

[John Harper]

Nicolas

I definitely think its to do with RAW Shooter and pulling down the highlight contrast. I have another shot of a Harris Hawk and although not as noticeable i think its still has the same problem of the edge Halo, so its maybe a trade off of detail in the highlights but creating halo.


John

 

[John_Nevill]

Hi John,

I had a quick peak at your images and it does look as though pulling highlight contrast down in RSP has emphasised the halo. I believe the algorithm used is like a notch filter and you end up with a false outline.

I used a LR curve to pull the highlight down and lift the darks as follows:

You can do a similar curve in RSP, I then outputted to CS2 and applied Nicolas' action.

Ignore the colour differences. I wanted to demonstrate how you could excessively pull down the sky and neck/tail highlights, add detail without introducing significant false outlines. Obviously there's some limitation in the source jpeg.

 

[nicolas claris]

I come to the same conclusion as John, your image is much more contrasty, white is clipped and darks have lost details, another way to get them a little back is highlight shadow filter from the image menu in PS (please note that I never use tht feature at a so high rate... :

Apply it to your image, you'll get this (halo is still there, noticeable:

with action used at 20% and eraser on halo, you'll get this:

the conclusion is that you have first to "derawtise" with less contrast... the sharpening cannot be done accurately...

You can get much more details from your original raw!

 

[John Harper]

John - Nicolas

Thank you very much for your input and the trouble you have gone too on my behalf. When I am less tired i will try and make head or tail of your solutions and hopefully try and get a better output picture.

I appreciate all the comments, but it certainly makes me realise how much i have to learn on this whole image processing area.


John

 

[John_Nevill]

No problem John, thats what OPFs all about.

I'm learning as much as you, with people like Nicolas affording the time and effort to provide his CS actions and share narrative, there's definitely a community spirit here, which isn't replicated on any other website forum. It refreshing to see and equally inspirational.

 

[Asher Kelman]

John H,

I'm sure that you are not the only one who will be practicing the suggestions here. Believe me a lot of fine photographers learn from the question people dare to ask!

Asher

 

[Steve Quattrocchi]

One of the main reasons that I never got into RSE was because of it's tendancy to create halos.

My technique with images like this is to do a very flat and neutral RAW conversion with no sharpening and do my sharpening and contrast tweaks in PS. This drastically reduces the tendancies to halo. my USM settings are typically 150, 0.2, 2 or so. I'd love the RAW file to play with though. WOnderful bird.

 

[Marian Howell]

i found this to be an helpful discussion, even though i do not use RSE (being on a mac). i've noticed a similar halo on a couple of my ice hockey shots this winter (the edges of those shiney helmets) in the raw file, and now i am inspired to go back to one of them and experiment with these ideas.
keep asking questions john!!