Chinatown, Sydney (2)

Posted by Andrew Gould (Sydney, Australia) on 27 October 2007 in Food & Cuisine and Portfolio.

This is the third in this series of showing off my new optical stabilizer zoom. (See the previous two days for background on it.)

I probably could have gone down to 1/4 sec here.
Taken at minus 2/3 of a stop to not burn out the highlights. This further helps give more leeway with hand holding, by the way.

25 October 2007, 6:43pm
Sigma 18-200mm f3.5-6.3 DC OS

In case you're wondering what processing was done, here's the entire sequence:
RAW file converted to 16 bit TIFF. Then in Photoshop used the shadow/hightlight filter to bring up the shadows quite a lot, and to further tone sown the highlights a touch. Curves used to push up the brightness. + 18 saturation to give it the look I remembered it having. A touch of added contrast by pushing the middle slider of the levels control to the right. Rotated a bit anti clockwise to get the verticals straight. Lens correction filter to correct the slight barrel distortion which is inevitable at wide angle. Cropped sides. (Had to crop upper edges a little because of the distortion correction.) Converted to 8 bit TIFF for smaller file size to keep.

For this upload, in Photoshop, I sharpened quite a bit, then resized using the image processor.

The above is quite simple to do, although it's slightly time consuming, of course. While it may appear to indicate a heavily processed image, in reality, all I'm doing is attempting to present the scene as close to the way it actually appeared to my eyes at the time of taking it -- as far as I can remember.

For anyone who's against the idea of such processing, and feels that there is some particular virtue in straight from the camera images, I'd remind them that the image is not the real thing ever, whether it's on film or is digital. All we can ever show for our trouble is a representation of reality.

Of course, if an image really does seem just right straight from the camera, that's fantastic. I only see that very occasionally on aminus3 and on other sites, when the photo has been shot as a jpeg. To my eyes, the result is usually a photo lacking in contrast.

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