PAD 75 - Stock

[Mike Farley]

Day 75 and some stocks have been in the house for a few days awaiting their turn in front of the camera.

Canon EOS 7D
EF 100 f/2.8 macro
15 secs
f/16
ISO 100
Tripod

[davidc]

Did you apply Simon's HDR-esque silver efex tweaks to this?

[Mike Farley]

Did you apply Simon's HDR-esque silver efex tweaks to this?

Yes. If you look at the entry for this image on 365project, you will see that I have also answered similar questions about it there.

http://365project.org/pictor/365/2013-03-16

[davidc]

I'd be interested to see the effects of the unsharp mask version, and if haloing is avoided.

[Mike Farley]

I'd be interested to see the effects of the unsharp mask version, and if haloing is avoided.

Do you think that you are seeing halos in this version?

[davidc]

I hadn't looked that closely to be truthful, not to mention the monitors suck badly here at work - also at ~100kb it's probably not a good candidate for pixel peeping anyway. But no, it doesn't appear to be "haloey". The white background would probably help I guess?

There's definitely something about the flowers and green buds that made me think you'd tried Simon's technique on it though.

r.e. the haloing question, I generally find that moving the unsharp mask sliders beyond "extremely conservative" setting quickly does result in haloing - a radius of 50 and zero threshold seemed pretty extreme hence I wondered how it would look

[Mike Farley]

OK, now I understand where you are coming from. Yep, the USM settings to pop the image do look very extreme, but they do work and do not cause halos. It is a well known technique and Nina demonstrated it at the recent Photoshop evening we did together at the club. You have to remember that USM is essentially a contrast control and it boosts apparent sharpness by increasing the contrast on edges. Bringing out texture is a function of contrast, so USM is being used in a way not originally intended.

Another way to achieve sometrhing similar is to pull the Clarity slider right across up to or near 100% during Raw conversion. If you have seen my exhibition images, that's part of the way I have achieved the gritty, textured effect, which was all done in Raw processing. (In essence, I went mad with the sliders to achieve an image which looked nothing like the start position.) Clarity is actually another contrast control, this time operating on the mid-tones.

As I use the Structure function within Silver Efex Pro 2 for to bring out texture, I do not have examples of either of these two methods. I do not know for certain, but I suspect it too works by altering contrast. I mentioned the USM technique to the lady on 365project as, like you, she does not have SEP2. Rather than try and judge from one of my images, it would be better to see how it works on your own ones to see if it is something you might use.

Incidentally, I have been using Simon's technique quite a lot recently as I find I like the slightly surreal look it gives and have posted a number for my PAD.