1429 - Simple Things II

Let’s say it was a typical Sunday. I was lazy and didn’t even go out to take pictures. Here is another one from Italy, again from Colonnata, the small village in the mountains of Carrara, where we ate that wonderfully tender white bacon called <atarget="_blank" href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lardo_di_Colonnata">Lardo di Colonnata.

The Song of the Day is “Simple Things” by Paolo Nutini. In “1068 – Simple Things” I already used that title, but then the Song was by The Crash. Here’s Paolo Nutini on YouTube. Despite his Italian name he is a Scotsman, and despite his young age of 20 at the time when the album was released, he is an excellent singer, backed by excellent musicians. Amazing!


There are 3 comments

Rick   (2010-09-12)

This is a very inviting picture! It's not often I'll look up the X2 size of your image and examine it, but today, I enjoyed digesting this scene. The building on the right seems quite bright, considering it is fully shaded. If it was brightened up, how did you do this? There's very little noise there, something I always suffer from if I try and brighten up shady areas.

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andreas   (2010-09-12)

Rick, can it be that you really suffer from pixel peeping? There is noise in those areas, but even at the maximum size that I let you see (1200 pixels at the longest edge) , the noise is already invisible. Actually the image looks very good when seen in Photoshop at 50%, and that's about what you see when you print it. With today's file sizes there is no good reason to look at 100% sizes. Why should you? You can't see the entire image even on the biggest monitors you can buy. If I had really been pedantic about noise, I could have run Topaz Denoise at the preset "Strong" on the image, and then used a black mask and a white brush to paint it through in the few areas where it would be beneficial, mainly in the leaves of the plants to the right. It's pretty fuzzy though. Noise in the stone is no problem at all, and in the red canvas of the chairs, when you remove the noise, you actually remove the impression of texture. So, basically the image could profit from noise removal in some, but maybe not all leaves. I didn't care about it, but yes, there is always the question of what it is, that's noisy. In general, with a well exposed image and a modern camera, you have plenty of headroom.

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Rick   (2010-09-13)

Well, yes. I admit it. I might be a pixel peeper. I guess coming from a print background, and working with some pretty dodgy cameras (and photographers) I'm always a little wary of noise - and people processing too much. Like I said, I always suffer from noise if I try and bring out the shadows; if I knew I'd be wanting to see into that shadow, I'd generally take a set of exposures, which is not always possible of course. But, like you say a modern camera will have plenty of headroom. Maybe I need to buy a new camera, instead of buying more bike bits. 🙂 My original comment is a different issue; I still find it inviting as a picture, exactly as presented. I did spend quite a while looking around it, before even thinking about that shadow. I see a lot of images every day; not that many make me stop for a closer look...

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