6
Votes
Ian Hayward's picture

Desert Sky

Taken en route to White Pocket in Arizona.

Canon REBEL T3i
13mm · f/10.0 · 241s · ISO 100
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10 Comments

Wow, looks great. Love these ultra long exposure images. Sadly the grain/noise in the sky looks a bit weird to me. Might be a result of a too strong jpg compression?

Thanks Peter. Not sure if the grain may be caused by my editing as I'm still relatively new to it.

It might be. There are also some tonal breaks in the top left corner. Editing soft grayscale tones can be tricky sometimes.

I'm going to show the level of my ignorance here, what are tonal breaks and how do I correct them?

Hi Ian, maybe I'm was mistaken and the term 'tonal break' isn't correct in English and wrongly translated. Sorry for this, I'm a bit confused myself. ;)

I meant there are some banding artifacts and in the very top left corner some posterization-like issues. So instead smooth gradients there are too few tones with abrupt changes from one to tone to another. The reasons for this can be very different. It can be caused by colormanagement-related issues or by too heavy tonal edits especially in a 8-Bit workflow. Fixing this depends on the actual source of the issue. You should check if you can see these issues I mentioned with your monitor first. If not, missing or wrong colormanagement might be the reason.

I've had a look at the raw colour image and think it may be just where there are less dense clouds streaking though next to blue sky. Do you think this could be it?

Yeah, this could be it. It's especially in the very dark areas.

There are a lot of videos about banding and Photoshop on youtube, e.g. this simple one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=840JidMpIa0

Good luck. :)

Thanks Peter, I'll take a look.

Good image, Ian! I like your composition and the contrasting direction of the sky's and rocks' streaking.

Any noise doesn't leap out at me, and could be minimised with selective noise reduction. It's probably simply a product of 4 min exposure. And I can't see banding artifacts (with which I struggle myself), only the sky's banding.

There's a tiny bit of haloing along the right edge of the skyline, which is slightly distracting to me.

Thanks for the positive comments Chris. This was my favourite shot from my trip last October, though my Landscape Arch image comes a close second for me but probably wouldn't stand up to scrutiny. Anyway, I hadn't noticed the haloing before, I really must pay more attention!

I'm still relatively new to editing and haven't yet looked into noise reduction, I just nudge the sliders up a bit because I figure I probably should for a long exposure image. I'm conscious that noise is not desirable but I've never printed any of my images to see how noisy they look. So I intend printing this off at A3 just to see what it looks like and how much of an issue noise is in a 4m exposure.