Joshua Tree National Park Nikon F5, 24mm, Fuji Velvia. This is my first attempt at posting here. I'm really struggling with getting a decent scan under the 50k limit. My slide looks much better than this jpg. I have a Nikon LS-2000 and Photoshop 5. Hope someone can give some advice. Thanks

-- Jeff Kelley (thocker@ix.netcom.com), January 09, 1999

Answers

IMO the composition is very good, although I'm distracted by that thing at 70,180 which looks like a person to me.

The main problem is the hard light and the strong shadows. Try to take this early in the morning or late in the afternoon...

I'm not sure wether there is something wrong with the scan. I normally start out with as good a scan as possible and then try to resize it till it fits 50k jpeg with a high quility compression factor.

It's important that you never resize your high resolution scan twice. e.g. if you need a different size get back to the large scan first.

-- Jan van Bodegraven (janvnbdg@mandic.com.br), January 09, 1999.

Welcome Jeff. I like the composion a lot also, but the light/exposure bothers me. I am not sure if it is the contrast or , on my screen, lack of tonal range. Does your slide look quite gray in the rocks? The foreground and rocks all look monotone gray to me. If it is not supposed to be this way you might try playing with color balance and saturation in Photoshop. Thanks for posting the image.

-- Micheal F. Kelly (Kellys@alaska.net), January 09, 1999.

Thanks for the comments. I guess I need to get a better handle on Photoshop. When I do an A/B comparison with the above image in Photoshop beside the same image in the browser window, the PS image has proper color and much more detail in shadow AND highlights?? The rocks are reddish or pinkish in the original - NOT washed out gray!

-- Jeff Kelley (thocker@ix.netcom.com), January 09, 1999.

Browsers don't display images the same as image editors, and even different browsers may display images differently. You have to optimize display for how it will look in a browser, and that's best done by experiment. There's no set way to do this and you have to pick a browser to test with! As you have found, the web isn't exactly optimized for image display yet.

You can provide a link to a larger image if you wish, but the inline image on this page must be under 50K (your's isn't by the way!), so those with slow links don't have to wait all day for the image to load, and it should be small enough so the full image is visible on a 600x800 screen in a typical browser (500 pixels high is OK), so people don't have to scroll to see it.

-- Bob Atkins (bobatkins@hotmail.com), January 09, 1999.

Try reducing the number of pixels per inch to reduce the file size. Since this particular image has a lot of high spatial frequencies (small textural details under high contrast) the file will be bigger than a less contrasty, less textured image.

As for the image itself, I bet if you came back at sunrise or sunset, you'd help the drama of the image immensely. As it is, the light is very harsh, and the image may well be a touch over-exposed. The composition is good...I get where you're going with it. Getting closer to the foreground objects might work OK too.

-- Duane Galensky (duane@wild-light.com), January 13, 1999.

One additional comment: keep in mind that Velvia is a high-contrast film. Under this lighting condition, I would use a low contrast film to reduce the effect of the harsh light. Of course, that still wouldn't beat the early morning or late afternoon light, but it'll help.

-- Shun Cheung (shun@worldnet.att.net), January 13, 1999.