D30 Gallery

[Don Cohen]

I have just discovered this forum, and am quite impressed with its professional appearance, and am just getting started reviewing its content.

I purchased a D30 about 5 months ago, and have been enjoying it immensely. I started my own website about 3 months ago, and would appreciate any feedback, constructive criticism, etc.

The focus of this site is Nature and Landscape Photography, and the most recent additions are from an 8 day trip I took to the southern Utah and northern Arizona areas of the U.S. I have 4 separate galleries from this trip. Previous galleries include one featuring Raptors from the Charlotte Raptor Center, various animals from the NC Zoo, etc. I also have one from England from a trip in June, last year, using the Nikon Coolpix 990.

The link is:

http://www.dlcphotography.net

I have a short form on the home page if you would like to receive email alerts when new pages are added.

Thanks for your interest, and a great forum.

[Pekka]

Hi Don,

Nice to see you here! I've surfed in your gallery a lot - it's very interesting and of very good quality.

I also like the quality of the resized photos - they seem to show the detail of the big image very well and do not look too oversharpened. what kind of resizing and sharpening workflow do you use for gallery images?

Pekka

[Don Cohen]

Thanks, Pekka. This is a wonderful forum you have here. I hope your traffic increases as it deserves to.

And I appreciate your comments on my site. As for sharpening, I use Corel PhotoPaint 9 as my editor, so the specifics may not exactly correspond to PhotoShop, but after converting from Raw to TIF (8-bit - I really haven't been convinced of the visible benefit of 16-bit), and adjusting curves/levels/tweaking color, etc., I apply unsharp mask as the last step. I switch to Lab Mode, select the lightness/luminance channel only, and apply usually at around 100%, anywhere from 1 to 3 pixels, depending on the type of image, and threshold of 1 to 2 (or sometimes higher with higher ISO images). I then reconvert to normal RGB mode. I convert these to high quality Jpegs's, re-import the EXIF data, and use these as my primary image source.

Once I decide which images to include in a gallery online, I'll resample down to 600x400 usually, and then re-apply a little unsharp mask again (lab mode/luminance channel again, 100%, 1 pixel, 1 threshold). This usually restores the 'snap' that is lost in downsampling.

I also resize the original down to 114x76 for the thumbnails, and also apply the same unsharp mask to these as well.

Regards, and good luck with your site!

[Pekka]

Thanks Don,

The LaB mode lightness channel must be the answer. I checked it quickly and it really gives better sharpening results. I also have Photopaint 9 (I've used PP since version 7) but a big problem is that it's not fully Win2000 compatible which means it in dual CPU system corrupts images from time to time and so it not reliable. I suppose they have fixed this in 10, but I'll keep my money for new lenses and not for software updates (Photoshop 6.01 works just fine for me).

BTW: with small images I have this problem that sharpening algorithms (USM, KPT and others) seem to sharpen bokeh "rings" too which is not desirable and generally make DoF longer than it should be. I suppose the only way to overcome this is to mask unwanted areas away before sharpening, right?

[Don Cohen]

You're right, Pekka - I'll often mask out background, sky, or other parts of an image I don't want sharpened, remembering to feather the edges some to avoid sharp demarcations.

Also, I've noticed that even though I've registered and checked the box for Email Notification when I post, I don't seem to be getting emails when a reply has been posted.

Is there something else I need to do?

[Pekka]

Email notification should work now. There was a bug there which luckily had an easy fix.

[Don Cohen]

That did it - thanks!