At Last!

[nickjohnson]

….. for the first time this year – I planned and executed a shot. Yes, it's a single image, just one POV. Just me, the camera and the tripod, taking pictures as the post sunset light faded to night time. And happy I am. It's clear, sharp, composed the way I imagined it in my minds eye. How lucky I am to live in a cooler part of the world – a place where convection currents in the air are not prevalent – so telephoto shots like this one – are viable.
I'm less happy with the way that jpeg encoding has crushed the life out of it. Robed the sky and sea of the pink tones of the fading light. Gross reduction of resolution making it look flat and one dimensional.

Oh well …...

[clactonian]

It's so frustrating when this happens. Can you bring some of the colour back by tinkering with the white balance Nick? You may have to over compensate prior to conversion.

[nickjohnson]

Thanks Mike. The problem I have with jpeg is that you cannot control it - the algorithms are imbedded. There are a number of poor results that become apparent with this image. The jpeg encoding algorithm programmatically re-sets the white and black point - typically allowing white and black clipping of 2.5% - then applies a gamma curve of unknown value. Colour resolution is compromised by encoding pixels in 8x8 blocks by averaging out the colour values. That's the bit that gives us the jagged edges on high contrast boundaries. Of course, this all works very well for the intended purpose - modem (remember those?) / phone line transmission of press ready colour / mono images - predating consumer digital photography by over 10 years.

Right, I'm fully vented now, and feeling much better!

[clactonian]

I take your point Nick, not that I understand what you're talking about!