Glassy, saturated looking photos

eurotrash

Senior Member
I've been looking a Flickr photos and a lot of these shots are super liquidy and fluid, almost glassy looking. Is this a function of lenses or is it some post trickery at work?
Is it Flickr itself imparting it's own magic on the photos? Either way, I want.

None of my photos really exhibit this level of "sheen", let's call it. They're real nice looking, but they don't have that polish that some of these photos have. I'm wondering why.
 

westmill

Banned
Its a little of everything realy, rather than just one thing.
Good exposure Fine ISO good sharp lens and good processing.
Ive noticed, when downloading on here, all my pics lose a lot of sharpness. They all look shabby in comparison to the originals.
Ive noticed if I actualy over sharp them they work a little better though. But ive still yet to download one as good as it realy is.
For realy fine work, Ive found that using unsharp mask for RAW files set at 100 seems about right for most.
When converted to JPG though, you can resharpen again in unsharp mask to 12. ( this is in capture NX2... Others may vary )
This is genraly enough to give incredable detail. Having a perfect exposure also effects apparent sharpness.
Its this sharpness I feel is what creates that glassy look. Once you start to push and pull shadow and highlight it seems quality suffers slightly.
If you want the ultimate quality finnished product, do as i suggest above but turn into a tiff rather than a jpg and then convert your tiff to a jpg.
Its a lot of extra trouble, but its worth it :D
 

eurotrash

Senior Member
Another odd thing about exposure is that my nikon seems to like to underexpose even when it reads a correct exposure. I'll meter off the subject, and it just comes out half-stop to full stop underexposed. This is possibly only because I LIKE my photos to POP out and punch you in the face, but so far, mine haven't been doing that..
 

westmill

Banned
The trouble is, meters simply are not perfect. They do a great job, but they can easily be fooled.
The meter sees everything as a midtone grey, no mater what. I tend to use centre weighted in conjunction with the AE lock.
I find this a more workable solution, or at least more reliable. The Nikon D300 is a bugger for massivley over exposing in bright contrasty condittions.
Its genraly quick and easy to spot and use something to take a reading from that reflects an average grey tone.
If your camera underexposes, you could always set + compensation dial and leave it there. As long as its consistent of course :)
 

eurotrash

Senior Member
that's pretty much what I've been doing. Problem is, it really only does this when in the shade. Direct sunlight at ISO400 seems to be perfect, but at ISO100 it really doesn't do well. I should give you some actual content so you can see what I mean..straight out of the camera of course
 

eurotrash

Senior Member
ok, so here's the first, imported to lightroom, exported to JPG at highest quality possible.
ISO100, shutter: 1/800, F5, Manual mode, Matrix meter
iso100.jpg


Here's the second same workflow
ISO400, shutter: 1/3200, F5, Manual mode, matrix meter
iso400.jpg
 

westmill

Banned
Ok I will do my best here. Firstly... the exposures are identical ! The differance between 100 ISO and 400 ISO IS exactly two stops, which the camera has compensated for precisely as the differance between 800 and 3200 is also exactly two stops.
For best sharpness I would recomend stopping down to F8. As you move in close DOF gets narrower too.
If you notice... the doff itself is very shallow here. You have actualy missed focus ! If you look to the right of the boulder, you will see the grass
is out of focus. The grass in front of the boulder however is very sharp. The initial amount of DOF is not wide enough to cover the whole boulder even if you had caught it. A lot of the answer here is to stop down enough to give you your desired amount of doff. And obviously to make sure
you have correct focus on your subject. Thats about the best i can do for now, before i get brain freeze lol
I hope that helps sumwhat though :D
 

eurotrash

Senior Member
I wasn't trying to get sharness or DOF west, just trying to show you the ISO weirdness. it's a.. rock, lol. I focused exactly to the middle of the rock with one of the side hugging viewfinder points. I would have tried harder if it were important enough to critically shoot. And yea, would have used F8 or even F11 and would have used a tripod because that lens is notoriously soft etc..etc..

What you said makes sense though as the camera correctly adjusts for the selected settings I chose. Perfect sense.
It didn't really exhibit the phenomenon here in these photos for whatever reason today. But I swear it happens sometimes:p But I DO like my pictures brighter.
 
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eurotrash

Senior Member
I suppose what I'm really asking, is do nikons underexpose by default? Or is it properly expose and am I simply wanting more exposure because of personal preference? Also, what is "correct" exposure? How is "correct" determined? Is Canon's "correctness" different than a Nikon's? Is there a standard?
 

westmill

Banned
Some cameras actualy do underexpose yes. Some considder this a good thing as it then retains better highlight detail and its genraly
better and easier to obtain more shadow detail. The pics look spot on to me though. I think nikon genraly gives a correct exposure.
As you say though, its also about taste. If you prefer brighter its easy enough to tweak using the compensation dial. Or using curves is a good way to sometimes give a pic more punch. :)
 

westmill

Banned
Just out of curiousity I had a look at it in capture NX2.
The pic was very soft indeed and had a shed load of latitude for alteration. Not sure if it was full size either, but it was only 1. sumit or other in size ? It took so much sharpening the file size almost doubled. View attachment 12090
 
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