Re: Can this image be saved? - pixel perspective

[Harold_L]

There were several good attempts made to "save" my over-exposed image of the Children's Railroad in Budapest. Today, I made one last test to see just how badly over-exposed this image was. I used "curves" in Picture window Pro to set all pixels black except for those that had an intensity of 250 to 255. Any pixels in that range are essentially pure white, thus containing no information about the subject photographed. The first image shows the results of this curve setting. I have an astronomical image processing program which allows one to obtain the intensity of an individual pixel. Almost all of the white pixels have an intensity of 255 - there are only a few with intensities of 250 to 254. No wonder Tim said, in an early message, that he thought there would be no hope of saving this image.

Note the areal coverage of the white pixels is just that of the white areas on the original image, below. So the lesson for us S500 folks is to pay closer attention to the really bright areas of the scene, and adjust the exposure setting accordingly. I was shooting in the manual mode, with the light metering set to "Evaluative".

Cheers,

Harold

[tim]

I'm suprised people did as good a job as they did - I know I couldn't have done it. Glad for you I was wrong :)

[BrandonSi]

wow, run that first one through the sketch filter and bam, instant hand-drawn Harold_L limited prints for sale!! ;)

[Harold_L]

I hadn't thought of the bw image as a sketch, BrandonSi. What a neat idea.

Tim, an obvious thought. By showing the image as BW with a threshold of around 250, you get to see exactly what portions of the picture contain "useful" data. For example, notice the shadows on the boy's shirt, which several people were able to bring up on the color image.

Harold