Angel of the North

[acurtis]

Please could someone tell me why the sky appears a bit blotchy, particularly just above the wings. Is it something caused by the jpeg compression?

Thanks

Andy


http://images.fotopic.net/?id=2357678

[Ikinaa]

Please could someone tell me why the sky appears a bit blotchy, particularly just above the wings. Is it something caused by the jpeg compression?

Thanks

Andy




Yes, these are the standard JPEG-Artefacts, the more the JPEG is compressed the more the artefacts appear.
They appear mainly where there's a change in contrast
For an example see here (http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/ai21/examples/images/jpeg.html)

[CyberDyneSystems]

What a wild looking sculpture!

I am assuming it is a tribute to the battle of Britain? An angel with Hawkwer Hurricane wings! :shock:

[acurtis]

Ikinaa

Thanks for the information. I thought it probably was the compression but had never seen it that bad before. On a full size image, the swirls in what should be uniform blue sky look like the effect of dropping water on a painting. I always collect the image as superfine quality and try to minimise the numer of times I save the image and then only use high quality. I used PS Elements on this image to crop away some sky and some of the lower land, used the Auto Colour Correction and saved as high quality. Perhaps this correction too has made the effect worse. The print-out is ok. I compressed again for the web site and perhaps that happens again for this forum as the effect is now much worse.

Would it be easy/worthwhile to remove? Should I subsequently save files as tiffs or PS (something lossless) as then they would only be compressed once by the camera (Ixus400; RAW mode not supported)? Any other advice appreciated?

CDS

Thanks for looking and your comments. The Angel is a fairly recent sculpture by Antony Gormley and dominates the (road and railway) entry to Gateshead and Tyneside from the South. Further details of its construction can be found at:
http://www.gateshead.gov.uk/angel/

Gormley said of the Angel: "The hilltop site is important and has the feeling of being a megalithic mound. When you think of the mining that was done underneath the site, there is a poetic resonance. Men worked beneath the surface in the dark. Now in the light, there is a celebration of this industry.

"The face will not have individual features. The effect of the piece is in the alertness, the awareness of space and the gesture of the wings - they are not flat, they're about 3.5 degrees forward and give a sense of embrace"

Regards


Andy

[Ikinaa]

Would it be easy/worthwhile to remove? Should I subsequently save files as tiffs or PS (something lossless) as then they would only be compressed once by the camera (Ixus400; RAW mode not supported)? Any other advice appreciated?



Of course if you want the best quality ad infinitum, you need to take the photo with the highest quality your cam can give you, then before any manipulation, save the photo in a lossless format such as tiff (i think there are also tiffs which use jpeg-compression... someone correct me if i'm not right please, so pay attention there also) or the PSD (photoshopdocument).
The PSD has the advantage that depending on your configuration, it saves (nearly) all the steps you did for arriving at the result you want, so undo, etc still works but has the disadvantage of rapidly growing in size