Stonehenge

[Britsdad]

Hi all,
Here's a typical pic of Stonehenge, I've decided that it looks better as a greyscale to print 24" x 8".
The problem I have is the light fringe all around the transition between the sky and the ground/stones.
I suppose I could select it all with the pen tool, but that seems a little over kill. Does anyone have an easier/quicker way of doing it?

John

Edit:---It doesn't look too bad as it is here, but believe me it's about a 3 mm fringe when it's printed !

[crimper]

You might try a bit of Clarity to bring out the texture and maybe the fringe will go away
derek

[Tony W]

I assume that the fringing is overagressive sharpening artefacts - possibly in camera sharpening from a P&S?

One way that may help (although a little time consuming) maybe to select the clone tool and clone the edges with the tool set to Darken sampling when you change direction to follow the contours. Hopefully it should just fill in the sky to stone interface without effecting the stone colour much!

Another way maybe to create a blur layer set to Darken mode and apply a very small radius blur to darken the lighter area and apply it several times. As the image posted so small did not try and see if this would work!

[mistermonday]

It's impossible to see the fringe in this low res image. If it resulted from chromatic aberration in the original, I would remove the CA in Camera Raw or LR before processing. If the original has been tonemapped, I would make the appropriate adjustments in that s/w. If you are stuck with a processed image with a halo resulting from increased contrast or sharpening, I would use the quick select tool to select the stones in question then use Refine Edge to defringe it.
Regards, Murray

[Britsdad]

Thanks for the replies people,

Sorry for the small pick, I have cropped it down some so you can see it easier.

I have been all round the edges with the clone tool set to darken and it seems to have worked quite well, even though it took for ever ;o)

As for the reason it is there in the first place, I couldn't tell you, it's nothing I've done, it was taken by a friend. I will ask her when she picks the finished image up though.

Anyway here's the finished article, be it only a small crop just to show you.

John.

[mistermonday]

John, that halo is very characteristic of an image that was processed with HDR/Tonemapper or a plug-in which generates similar tonal inversions / high contrast edges. You've done a good job mitigating it.
Regards, Murray

[Britsdad]

Cheers Murray,

I'm not sure, but I can't really imagine the owner of the original playing about with HDR or tonemapping (wouldn't have thought she's even heared of it)
Would you think it could be just a querk of her camera?
John

[John Wheeler]

Hi John
Without specifics of her camera, whether she took it with RAW or JPG, camera settings, and/or any subsequent processing with the software to import it would be hard to debug. To give an example per what Tony indicated in regards to over sharpening I took my Nikon D200 and took some sample shots with different camera settings for JPG (I usually only shoot in RAW so this was just to demonstrate). Here are a couple images of a neighbors roof line (some in sunlight and some in shade with blue sky background). These images are at 800% magnification

The first image is with Sharpening set to Auto:

Screen shot 2011-10-12 at 2.37.50 PM.png

This second image was with Sharpening set to High:

Screen shot 2011-10-12 at 2.38.10 PM.png

You can see that with the high sharpening the edge contrasts are set very high. It inserts both a white band in the lighter areas and a darker band in the darker areas. Sometimes the lighter bands are more noticeable than the darker bands yet not always.

I noticed that in your image you took care of the light bands around the edges yet the dark bands on the rock are still there. That may be perfectly fine yet I believe they are still an artifact of the original image and either the camera settings or download post processing (a lot of download software including Lightroom have import preset options). Either way I think you are going to end up with a real fine panorama image.

[Britsdad]

Cheers John,

I must admit I didn't even notice the darker edges on the stones until you commented, but yea now you've said they stand out like a sore thumb.
I think you must be correct, and she added "sharpening" in camera at time of shooting the image.
Thanks again.....John

[John Wheeler]

Hi John

Not sure you have to overly worry about the black edge. Just like you did not see it many others will not as well. The eye brain combination does well at recognizing edges and that is aided by the contrast at the edges. Always a balance about how much is too much vs just right. All that depends on the size of the print and the viewing distance as well.

As far as the camera, I think for the JPG mode and the many settings most cameras allow, once they are set, many folks just leave them there and don't think about it too much. I suspect her camera has been set that way long ago and is now just used as her default settings. Just a guess All this of course is just IMHO and others my have a different opinion.

[Tony W]

Just to add a little to John's thoughts I had a similar problem to the one exhibited here and came to the conclusion that this was due to in camera sharpening of an image captured as jpeg.

This was a borrowed camera and I shot in jpeg (did not realise RAW available) the artefacts were noticeable on several images, not all! AFAIK once set to jpeg there was no means to control the amount of sharpening applied therefore you are at the mercy of the manufacturers settings - I suspect this is the case with many P&S cameras
Original thread Here

[Britsdad]

Ah Tony,

Exactly the same, thanks for the heads up.

Must admit I've never seen it with my camera http://www.panasonic.co.uk/html/en_G...819/index.html but saying that, I turned off all the sharpening when I bought it.

John