Fern leaf 3X

Wayne Baker · Post by **Wayne Baker** » Fri Oct 23, 2009 6:25 pm

Fern leaf from my garden... 3X mag at sensor...

Canon 65mm MP-E, 5D mkII, 50 images, Helicon Focus method A radius 3, smoothing 4...

PS has done something funky in the web conversion but it still looks OK..

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Sat Oct 24, 2009 2:01 pm

Wayne Baker wrote:PS has done something funky in the web conversion but it still looks OK..

I agree that this still looks good.

Can you say more precisely what "something funky in the web conversion" means?

If it's a matter of color/brightness shifts, then I think what you're seeing is a color profile issue. When you "save for web", Photoshop often (always?) just strips whatever profile the image has, without converting the pixel values to match. Software that displays the saved image then assumes that it's sRGB, so the interpretation doesn't match the actual pixel values. If the image started off as Adobe RGB, for example, the saved version is likely to end up looking darker, less contrasty, and less saturated than it really ought to be.

--Rik

Wayne Baker · Post by **Wayne Baker** » Sat Oct 24, 2009 3:41 pm

That sounds about right Rik. I've never been a fan of using that 'save for web' thing as the colours shift. It wasn't a huge shift. The smaller image turned out a bit darker than the original and lost some detail, although I did set the jpg compression to high quality.

This was a tough image as the surface of the frond is highly specular. The lighting is almost at the same level as the frond, coming in from both sides, with a cylinder of trace around the frond for diffusion. For this sort of thing I may need to double-layer the trace paper of the cylinder for even more diffusion. It's tough trying to control specular reflections whilst maintaining lighting contrast. That's been my biggest challenge so far with this work...

Cheers!

Wayne

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Sat Oct 24, 2009 3:58 pm

You can prevent the color shifting by explicitly converting your images to sRGB before saving them for the web. In Photoshop CS, it's Image > Mode > Convert to Profile > sRGB IEC611966-2.1. One might hope that Photoshop would do this automatically, or at least warn people, but it doesn't (or at least didn't, up through the version 8.0 CS that I'm still using).

I would not expect loss of detail with high quality jpeg. But I notice that you say "smaller image" also, which leads me to think that perhaps you lost sharpness in the resizing. That usually happens to me too, which is why I typically sharpen 35% at 0.7 pixels just before saving the web-sized versions.

--Rik

Wayne Baker · Post by **Wayne Baker** » Sat Oct 24, 2009 4:49 pm

Cheers Rik. Usually for online images I don't stress too much about the conversions as long as they retain most of the image quality that I'm happy with it's usually fine for me...

Sharpening isn't really one of my strong points. I know it probably should be, but it's always put me off as I find sometimes images are destroyed because of it. Perhaps it's because I really have not much clue about it and there is a cue for some extra work on my behalf!

Charles Krebs · Post by **Charles Krebs** » Sat Oct 24, 2009 6:22 pm

Rik,

In CS3 and CS4 (PS10 and 11) there is an option to convert to sRGB when saving for web. (You need to be a little careful since it also converts the "working copy" in the program. So don't save it if you wish to stay in another color space).

Fern leaf 3X

Fern leaf 3X

Re: Fern leaf 3X