How to avoid too much photoshoping??

[LisaMarie]

I noticed after altering my picture on lightroom that around the outside of the sky in my picture there was noticable lines where the exposure changes? I wonder what settings i over used to create that fake look?
Thanks

 

[LisaMarie]

You can slightly notice it on the left hand side how there is some verticle stripes almost in a way

 

[Sherman Banks]

Do you have a larger image? I can't see what your talking about on this small of a photo.

 

[LisaMarie]

I dont right now because i actually just took this one from my flikr page

 

[davebmck]

Did you make any adjustments in the vignette section?

 

[Moon Baby]

Hmm...I assume you're talking about jpeg artifacting? If so, re-editing of jpeg files and saving them slowly decreases the image's quality. If that's the case, I'd always shoot in RAW and archive the original if you do a lot of editing.

 

[LisaMarie]

I just used all the features in the Develop column, im not sure which the vignette is?

 

[LisaMarie]

Moon Baby, thats actually what i was thinking happened, the pictures are actually my fathers and i said i would edit them for him and he only shoots in Jpeg, and i actually did the photo editing at work then brought the finished copy home on usb, and discovered that my work monitor colors were off and continued to alter the picture again. Only this time it saved with those exposure verticle stripes.. So is this why people are all for the Raw shooting as opposed to the Jpeg, is this a perfect example of something that would not have happened if they had been shot in Raw??

 

[Sherman Banks]

So is this why people are all for the Raw shooting as opposed to the Jpeg, is this a perfect example of something that would not have happened if they had been shot in Raw??

Well, with RAW, you don't have the image degradation that you get with jpegs and would've been able to refer to the original RAW file to start over. I think when you start shooting/editing RAW, you never shoot jpeg again, at least it was that way for me. It's a nice looking photo though.

 

[Moon Baby]

Moon Baby, thats actually what i was thinking happened, the pictures are actually my fathers and i said i would edit them for him and he only shoots in Jpeg, and i actually did the photo editing at work then brought the finished copy home on usb, and discovered that my work monitor colors were off and continued to alter the picture again. Only this time it saved with those exposure verticle stripes.. So is this why people are all for the Raw shooting as opposed to the Jpeg, is this a perfect example of something that would not have happened if they had been shot in Raw??

My forum name makes me giggle...and yes, that's one reason why people shoot raw. Raw is basically a digital negative with no in-camera adjustments like jpeg (sharpening, contrast, saturation...etc.) so it appears somewhat flat when you view it. It has greater tonal/dynamic range than jpeg due to being shot in 12-14bit as jpeg is 8bit. Photoshop, lightroom and software provided with your camera handles raw very well.

What I love about raw is if I mess up my exposure or white balance, it can easily be adjusted with absolutely no damage done to the picture itself.
Some people prefer jpeg because raw is meant to be processed and adds onto the workflow. Lazy people!

 

[Dwig]

Most of what is visible in the small image posted are JPEG compression artifacts. There is, though, very slight evidence of some slight posterization or "steping" that I can see about 15-20% of the way in from the left edge. What I see appears to be somewhat wavy.

Digital images are digital. each pixel has some interger value for the brightness of each color. Fractional values are not possible. As a result, a true smooth gradient is not possible. Normally, these increments or steps are so small they are not decernable, but when you attempt to expand the scale of a portion of an image that initially is represented in a narrow range of brightnesses, the steps show. It is often seen in smooth blue skys that have no natural detail to disquise the issue.

These are hard to fix. Sometimes applying a localized blur to the area will work. Other times a specialized blur that smears in one direction across the lines and parallel to the natural undulations of the smooth clouds is necessary. These blurs will smooth any noise and can make the fix noticable. Applying a localized heavy noise reduction to the whole sky and then adding some uniform noise can, at times and if done judicially, mask the retouching.

 

[LisaMarie]

Thanks for the advice everyone, ill try and correct this problem with the helpful advice given, i also suspect though that this image turned out the way it did due to the extreme altering i did, In this case (as i tend to get very creative) would i be able to alter a RAW image to these extreme alterations with out these sort of imperfections??

(the picture was only shot in 200 ISO, The picture needed to be cropped, and i didnt like the exposure for a few examples of corrections!)

 

[Josh66]

Can't see the picture in your last post - but I think I know what you're talking about.

How much did you adjust the "Fill Light" slider?
If you go too far on that, you'll get an outline around everything.


Edit
Hmm... I think you might be talking about something else. Still, don't go too far on the fill light slider, lol.

 

[Dwig]

Your altered image is an impressive improvement over the original. The vignetting (artificial darkening of the edges) is a bit too extreme for my taste, but I agree that some darkening is needed.

If the original is RAW, be sure that your convert the RAW image to a 16bit image in Photoshop, not 8bit, and do all of your manipulations in 16bit mode. Reduce the image to 8bit only when you are completely done editing and only if you need to (e.g. exports as JPEG which doesn't support 16bit, ...). This will create an image with finer increments in the tonal values substantially reducing the likelyhood that posterization will occur.

 

[LisaMarie]

Ok last question then i promise to leave this alone! If i were to use a camera with a larger sensor and with higher mega pixels ( i think the camera that took the picture used between 8-10 megapixels and did not have a full frame sensor) would that make a difference in these sorts of issues? Like say if i were to use the Mark II at 21.1 megapixels with its full frame sensor would i be able to have noticable results, and possibly erase my over processed picture noise completely (or close to) so long as i shoot in RAW? (with of course ignoring any other possible factors that could affect image quality)