good idea, or horrible cliche?

[Bigbitt8706]

i have actually never done a sepia shot before because i always thought that they were a cliche. maybe i'm a tool, but i like this one.

http://i266.photobucket.com/albums/ii262/bigbitt8706/IMG_3178edited.jpg

[eddarr]

I don't think sepia is cliche. I am very picky about what types of pictures look good in sepia. I know it's not correct but I think the picture should be somewhat nostalgic in nature.

I think this picture is close. But something is not quite right. Did you try a B&W first?

[AngryCorgi]

It looks too posterized, but that may have just been in the interest of file size. Posterized clouds look bad, IMO.

[wallybud]

speia is fine but you didnt sepia it well enough hehe! try messing with the blend mode in layers after you layer in your sepia

[Jim G]

I think sepia could work well enough in this shot... it's not cliched, it's one of the many tools at our disposal :)

[Bigbitt8706]

eddarr- i did try b&w first, and it definetly looks better in sepia. IMHO, the b&w one just doesnt capture the mood as well

Angry Corgi- i'm a newb, what does posterized mean?

wallybud- i didn't even think to do that lol... i'll post a new one later this afternoon

Jim G- Thanks!

i love my lazy municipal system... they leave burned down buildings standing for months, so if anyone has any tips on composure, lighting, time of day, etc.... let me know! thanks!

[mattaura]

From wiki: "Posterization of a photographic image being developed occurs when a region of an image with a continuous gradation of tone is replaced with several regions of fewer tones, resulting in an abrupt change from one tone to another."

So you clouds might have say.....8 different shades of sepia...making them look "posterized," when say, 50 shades of sepia would make them look more authentic. How they got that way I'm not sure. Maybe you tweaked the levels and clipped some color information and then toned it. Just a guess...I'll leave that for somebody else. I do like the image though. Good job.

[bigbaby987]

i like it.. burn the clouds to make them more dramatic and you're in the money..

[Bigbitt8706]

i know it looks posturized on the screen, but it prints pretty well. is there anyway to burn in the sky AND make it look good on screen? any way here are two more from that trip

http://i266.photobucket.com/albums/ii262/bigbitt8706/IMG_3139edited2.jpg

http://i266.photobucket.com/albums/ii262/bigbitt8706/IMG_3223edited2.jpg

[PETERSYMES]

i know it looks posturized on the screen, but it prints pretty well. is there anyway to burn in the sky AND make it look good on screen? any way here are two more from that trip



http://i266.photobucket.com/albums/ii262/bigbitt8706/IMG_3223edited2.jpg

I like this shot.

[ghosh]

Your picture looks little grainy. Did you shoot in high ISO?

[Bigbitt8706]

thanks peter!

ghosh- i actually shot it at 100 iso... i'm not getting much grain, but that may just be my monitor... have i oversharpened? i think it was around a 20% sharpen, but maybe a little less

[ghosh]

Thanks for the info..

[lbcyalater]

I like the idea but the sky looks like a painting

[tonydee]

Re the posterisation: there's a lot of very demanding high-contrast foreground detail, which will be prioritised by the JPEG compression algorithm on the assumption that fuzziness in high-contrast areas will stand out much more than issues between areas that are pretty close anyway. That's to say: it thinks errors in your foreground will be noticed more than errors in the sky. Sadly, it's not quite right this time: we probably see how busy the foreground is - and it's not like computer text that we expect to be perfectly straight and clear-cut - and without arbitrarily fixating on any single edge or IQ aspect (there are too many to choose from) - we keep looking around the picture.

Not that it helps anyone, but I've often thought it would have been cool if you could create a B&W layer in an image where the darker you painted in a particular part of the image the higher the JPEG image quality would be in that area... allowing manual prioritorisation of faces or other important detail. Not sure if anyone's ever done this, or the JPEG algorithm is actually very amenable to it.

More generally, I think the picture needs a little more compositionally. The left hand side is kind of gaping wide open. Obviously no choice about it in the part of the building you've shown us in that first shot.

The second shot looks almost IR-ish... somehow unsettling. Angling the camera upwards has also left your verticals converging markedly, which is almost ok on the right, but looks kind of strange for the half door-frame on the left. I think the picture also needs just a little bit more ground underneath it to feel fully settled.

The third picture you posted is just really, really cool - one of the most interesting I've seen in C&C. Maybe a touch more distance between the railings and edge on the right, and somehow the PPing has made the background wall-in-ruins look a bit pasted on. If it were mine I might try a few options with perspective correction in the Gimp, but I'm not sure that'd lead anywhere useful. Great stuff as is!

Cheers, Tony