Would appreciate Critique

[agsurfer]

Greetings,

I am just beginning to venture into the world of the digital darkroom; learning to apply some of the burning and dodging concepts to the digital medium that I have enjoyed so much in the wet lab. This is the product of my first color to B&W conversion. I burned and dodged on seperate layers. Does the image look overmanipulated or too contrasty? I would appreciate critiques and observations.

[martin-images]

Ita little small to realy look at but from what i can see it looks quite impressive, would love to see it at say 800 by 600, maybe you can repost larger or link to site ???

Digital monochrome conversions @
http://martin-images.smugmug.com/gallery/464835/1/24701603
coming soon www.digital-monochrome .com

[arumdevil]

it looks pretty good to me! it's a bit small though so it's hard to tell. If you could show a version at 800 pixels wide I think that would give people more to go on.

[arumdevil]

lol, he posted while I was writing mine :D

[martin-images]

Copycat lol
Martin



lol, he posted while I was writing mine :D

[agsurfer]

Yea, I thought it was too small also. I am still learning about all of this. Now that I am getting camera functions down and understanding Whtebalance, I guess it's time to devote a llittle attention to mananging all of these images. So how do you guys post your images? I made this one larger by degrading quality down to about 54% and keeping the image at 800x600. The dpi is 72. What's the best way to post images and keep the best picture quality?

[arumdevil]

I normally find 800 pixels on the longest dimension is adequate for most internet postings. save from photoshop (if you use it) with the save for web feature, jpg, around 35-60 quality is normally good enough.

I think the photo is very well processed though perhaps a little flat on the lighter end of the spectrum. just my opinion of course tough.

[whowie]

I like your subject matter and composition, agsurfer. My critique would be that I find the light a bit cool (too blue). What does it look like if you warm it up a bit? In all fairness, though, I'm viewing this on my laptop which doesn't have the best saturation and color balance.

As far as enlarging an image I prefer to use PS to enlarge the image by 110% in each dimension until I get the size I want. I then knock the DPI back to about 72 and save as a high quality JPG. I use 110% because PS's resize algorithms used to be optimized to that value. I'm not sure if that still holds with PS CS2 but it's a matter of habit for me now.

Wes