One of my more prized shots of recent, looking for some comments.

New here to this forum, everyone seems to be pretty friendly.

I took this shot one afternoon last week at a site called Chapel Brook Falls in Ashfield, MA. I did a little bit of post processing on it, but not a whole ton, mostly just some level adjustments and played with the shadows a little. One thing I was curious about was at the top, where the light is coming through the branches, what the purple fringe is that covers some of that thicker branch that comes in towards the center? I'm fairly new, only been shooting for about a month now, plan to hit Barnes and Nobles and pick up some of the books I've seen suggested.

Just looking for general comments, any critique is appreciated. Thanks.
Shots were taken with a Canon Powershot Pro1, no filters, all EXIF data is there.

Just taking a guess here ( as I am new here too ) but it looks like it may be chromatic abberations which you will find in high contrast areas. I also noticed you have a little of the purple fringe in the snow down in the lower left corner of the picture. These can be fixed in PS. It depends on whether the picture is Raw or JPG. If JPG , you can use the lens filter under the distort menu in Photoshop.

Yeah, I noticed more of that fringing all along the branches where the highlight are. I just took a few minutes in CS2 with that lens correction option, and what an improvement that makes. It doesnt correct things completely, but it certainly makes a marked difference in the fringing.

Will a circular polarizer help to correct some of that in situations like that, or is it something you really cant get around? I've heard of the chromatic abberation before, but just wasnt entirely sure of what it was until now.

I did in fact pick up a Tiffen 58mm circular polarizer a few days ago, will be interested to see what an impact that will make on shots like this where I have rather high contrast lighting areas like in this photo.

Thanks for the info and the input.

beautiful shot but i too found the chromatic abberation a bit distracting...im not sure if a polarizer will help that personally but it does do many other wonders to photographs, even simply cutting down on light for longer exposures like this one

It is a beautiful shot and I love the slow shutter effect on the water. But, the purple fringing is bothersome. I would love to know why!

This is just a guess, but I think you may have been making some adjustments on the color balance to get things the way you thought they ought to be. It would not surprise me to find that when making such adjustments in an 8 bit per channel JPG and making several saves, you may get any number of different artifacts - especially in color, color tinges or casts in certain tonal ranges, etc. All of that comes about from trying to manipulate things in the eight bit world where you can get some cross-coupling due to the rather limited dynamic range. Frequent saves in JPG will cause certain problems all by itself.

You might try keeping your JPG as it comes out of the camera completely untouched and immediately convert it to 16 bit TIF or PSD and do all your work in that environment and not come back to 8 bit JPG until you are doing the final sizing and sharpening.

Speaking of sizing, your image is 1000 pixels on the long side, so you should be sure to keep the images at 800 max in either direction for this forum.

It's a very nice shot of the waterfall with reasonably good composition (a little tight), and reasonably good placement of values (snowy area in lower left looks as if it could be a little brighter.

I would be interested to see a colour version.

If i'm not mistaken, that is a colour shot! Nice, I really like the effects on the water! You've done an excellent job here as far as I'm concerned. What were the stats of the shot (shutter speed etc)?

Dave

I have seen this effect in some of my own shots and from my memory comes from pushing up the saturation too high. Tends to show up along adges of areas that are bright white like your sky (around the branches) and snow at bottom left. Great shot though.

Thanks for the comments.

Robert_Laby,I actually just made the switch today to shooting RAW to see how I like that, and would that make any improvement in my ability to process them without getting those color artifacts and other abnormalities you'd get processing in 8bit RGB? I also do all my editing in one sitdown, usually not spending more than 5-10 minutes on a photo, usually with a single save at the end, maybe one before resizing.

Most of my color adjustments were trying to bring out the greens in the trees a bit more, darken up the shadows behind the water a little. I size most of my photos for placement on my flickr.com photo page, thats why its a bit large.

I can really only improve from here as a photographer, so thanks for the comments.

The touched up version using the color correction looks much nicer.

jlacoy82 wrote:
Thanks for the comments.

Robert_Laby,I actually just made the switch today to shooting RAW to see how I like that, and would that make any improvement in my ability to process them without getting those color artifacts and other abnormalities you'd get processing in 8bit RGB? I also do all my editing in one sitdown, usually not spending more than 5-10 minutes on a photo, usually with a single save at the end, maybe one before resizing.

Most of my color adjustments were trying to bring out the greens in the trees a bit more, darken up the shadows behind the water a little. I size most of my photos for placement on my flickr.com photo page, thats why its a bit large.

I can really only improve from here as a photographer, so thanks for the comments.

The touched up version using the color correction looks much nicer.

Shooting RAW has several advantages. Vis-a-vis our current concerns those advantages are:
1) coming out of RAW processing you have the choice of staying in 16 bit/channel mode.
2) corrections made to color balance are less likely to do non-linear things.
3) If you do make corrections during RAW processing that cause clipping in one of the channels, you see it as it happens.

It took me a while to switch to RAW all the time but I am known to be stubborn. But, since I switched, I have noticed a change in the quality of my photos. I don't understand that completely but I have. I'm talking about the photos that have been converted from RAW to .jpg. Maybe part of that is I'm actually trying a little harder as time goes by to take better pictures too.

Just a thought!

Aside from your technical issues of colour, you have a wonderful shot here. I love the perspective.

Wow, I've spent the past several hours fooling around with about 150 images I shot in RAW this morning, and I'm absolutely amazed. I'm hooked.

I'm using Adobe Bridge + CS2, and now that I know what I'm looking for, fixing some minor/mild chromatic abberation is as simple as a few adjustment sliders, not to mention the infinitely greater control you have over exposure, brightness and color altogether. If I had the above shot in RAW, I'm convinced I could have made it MUCH better photo, even though I still like it as it is.

I have to cut myself some slack, I'm new. :P Learning new things with the camera, as well as with the computer end of it every day, and loving it.

You have caught the water well, I like it.