Need Help with Underexposed FogBank

[mitsu13gman]

I was hoping to do some people shooting in town with my new flash last night, but the fog kept the street circus away and I found myself out for a drive trying to relax.

I lucked upon a break in the fog right around a small inlet here in town called "Back Bay."

Unfortunately, it looks like I did a pretty good job of underexposing it. When I shot two weekends ago, I went nuts with exposure compensation and ended up with some blown highlights, so I decided to let the meter do its thing. Besides, everything looked pretty neutral grey, anyway.

Here's what I ended up with. The first image is just the RAW with white-balance adjusted and about 1/3-stop positive boost in exposure, and a little curves applied to bring out the gradient in color around the horizon.

The next image most closely approximates what the scene looked like, and it looks fine as a 1024-pixel JPG. I noted above the picture all of the changes I made from the first shot. The last image is a 100% crop from the original RAW with all of the steps applied - it looks like I'm running out of data in the mid-tones and it's getting posterized.

Is there anything I can do to rescue this, or am I stuck. If I'm stuck, how large of a print do you think I could reasonably get away with given the loss of detail, with a 10MP image as a starting point? My experience so far suggests that an 8x10 would still look great, but I'd like to go a little bigger if it won't just look like garbage.

I tried posting the RAW up, but Imageshack just threw it out, and the 16-bit TIFF is almost 60MB, so I'd rather not upload that, but feel free to massage the first image to your heart's content, if you feel so motivated!

Original w/ Curves:
http://img38.imageshack.us/img38/3025/backbayfog01small.jpg

Original + Curves with Levels to pull max output to max on histogram, then +25 saturation on that, then +20 Brightness on that:
http://img55.imageshack.us/img55/2916/backbayfog04small.jpg

Original RAW with all above applied - 100% crop:
http://img229.imageshack.us/img229/5973/backbayfog05.jpg

[mitsu13gman]

Well, not to bump my, at this point zombie, thread - but I had this image printed at a few different sizes and thought I'd share the results.

I had it printed 8x12, 16x20, and 20x30, during MPix' special on large prints.

The 8x12 is, as you would expect, flawless. You can't detect any of the posterizing shown above.

The 16x20 is almost as good. If you look VERY close, you can make out the posterizing, but it's very hard to see.

The 20x30 is still excellent. I showed it to 2 other photographers and both had to be shown the issue I was concerned with. Even then, you can only see if it you look at it within 1 foot or less. By 3 feet, it looks flawless again.


So to answer my own question, I'd say it can be printed up to 20x30 depending on the application. I would suspect that 24x36 would start to break up pretty bad, but I'd really need to upsample at that point anyway. Were I to do so, I'd do the upsample before the rest of the post-processing to give me more pixels to work with. I'd probably go WAY over and work back, which is a technique often used in audio DSP.


Anyway, I'm very happy with the 20x30 and have it hanging on my wall. The 16x20 will be going in a frame for my family. Nothing spectacular, but hey - it's my first big print!


Mike

[Grimes]

Congrats, I was actually wondering how this one turned out...despite being a zombie, lol.

[mitsu13gman]

Alex,

I was surprised that I didn't have any responses to the original post. When MPix had their special, I decided to answer my own question and post up.

Truth be told, it came out a little underexposed in the print. But since I'd hit the greens in the grass pretty hard, I think it worked overall. If I was being cheritable I'd call it "moody."

I guess they can't all be bright-happy-sunshiny-goodness, right?