Gone Soft Again According To Alamy

[M.Chapman]

Thanks for posting the 100% image. I agree with others, at 100% size it looks too soft to me, with the foreground boat being the softest. Downsizing to 3000 x 2000 makes the buildings look better, but the foreground boat is still too soft. Could be movement of the boat, or just that the point of focus is too far away and there's not enough depth of field at F6.3.  IMHO.

 

Mark 

[liverpix]

Thanks for your replies and suggestions. It doesn't bother me if it's slightly soft in the foreground. The boat acts as a frame to the main part of the photo, the background, which is all sharp to me. I think lots of photos have just one part of it sharp and the rest of the photo blurred//soft (selective focus) - would Alamy fail all those photos ?

[John Mitchell]

54 minutes ago, liverpix said:

Thanks for your replies and suggestions. It doesn't bother me if it's slightly soft in the foreground. The boat acts as a frame to the main part of the photo, the background, which is all sharp to me. I think lots of photos have just one part of it sharp and the rest of the photo blurred//soft (selective focus) - would Alamy fail all those photos ?

 

My guess is that because the boat occupies so much of the foreground, Alamy expects it to be in focus.  Photos with less prominent foreground objects that are not totally in focus might be OK, but please don't quote me on this...

 

BTW Did you use AF or MF with this shot?

 

[hdh]

5 hours ago, liverpix said:

Thanks for your replies and suggestions. It doesn't bother me if it's slightly soft in the foreground. The boat acts as a frame to the main part of the photo, the background, which is all sharp to me. I think lots of photos have just one part of it sharp and the rest of the photo blurred//soft (selective focus) - would Alamy fail all those photos ?

 

Sorry for being blunt, but I cannot see which part of the background is in focus, the entire picture is SOLD. 

Probably it is not camera shake but from high ISO-noise reduction and over sharpening in the camera? 

On a side note, the clouds are also blotchy, specially the ones "in the front".  

I would say that QC is right in this case.  

 

EDIT: Alamy QC does accept selective focus also if foreground objects are out of focus but the background is sharp. 

 

[spacecadet]

It's at 400 ISO so probably not a problem arising from that per se.

 OP, because my jpegs were usually fine I took a lot of convincing to change over to RAW but the forum was right and I was wrong. The clue is in the word "usually". It's not the "fine" ones that fail QC. This is just the sort of shot which, assuming no camera shake and correct focus, might have passed as a RAW original but failed as a jpeg. Try it, your jaw will drop when you see the difference. It wouldn't have been needed here, but it's astonishing how much NR you can apply to a high-ISO RAW without affecting the fine detail at all. Jpeg just takes the detail and smooths it out. You need to control that yourself and RAW lets you.

[M.Chapman]

18 hours ago, John Mitchell said:

 

My guess is that because the boat occupies so much of the foreground, Alamy expects it to be in focus.  Photos with less prominent foreground objects that are not totally in focus might be OK, but please don't quote me on this...

 

100% agree. In the OP shot the boat is too prominent a feature occupying major areas of the frame to be regarded as unimportant (from a sharpness viewpoint).

 

Mark

[liverpix]

19 hours ago, John Mitchell said:

 

My guess is that because the boat occupies so much of the foreground, Alamy expects it to be in focus.  Photos with less prominent foreground objects that are not totally in focus might be OK, but please don't quote me on this...

 

BTW Did you use AF or MF with this shot?

 

AF

[wiskerke]

There are some ropes on the boat that look more or less sharp. The rest of the boat has been moving and is blurred. The background is out of focus.

 

wim

[Jansos]

You need the Lightroom Sildenafil plugin - guaranteed to make even the softest of photos rock hard (or so I have been told!) 

[liverpix]

6 hours ago, Jansos said:

You need the Lightroom Sildenafil plugin - guaranteed to make even the softest of photos rock hard (or so I have been told!) 

[liverpix]

22 hours ago, wiskerke said:

There are some ropes on the boat that look more or less sharp. The rest of the boat has been moving and is blurred. The background is out of focus.

 

wim

To me the ropes and masts in the foreground are sharp. So too is the background.

[M.Chapman]

5 hours ago, liverpix said:

To me the ropes and masts in the foreground are sharp. So too is the background.

Interesting. What sort of monitor are you using? If it's one of those very high pixel density displays e.g. 4k or Retina then your images may appear sharper than they are. The "image must appear sharp when viewed at 100%" rule assumes that the viewer has sufficiently good eyesight and is viewing at a distance where they can resolve individual image pixels. if you have a high pixel density display where you can't see the individual pixels you nay need to inspect at 200%. Alternatively check your monitor isn't applying any sharpening.

 

Mark

[hdh]

34 minutes ago, M.Chapman said:

Interesting. What sort of monitor are you using? If it's one of those very high pixel density displays e.g. 4k or Retina then your images may appear sharper than they are. The "image must appear sharp when viewed at 100%" rule assumes that the viewer has sufficiently good eyesight and is viewing at a distance where they can resolve individual image pixels. if you have a high pixel density display you nay need to inspect at 200%. Alternatively check your monitor isn't applying sharpening.

 

Mark

(really liked the eyesight part  ) 

 

I do agree that images tend to look sharper on a 4K monitor. 

Anyway, I now use my 4k monitor for QC but where uncertain I revert over to the HDTV monitor. 

From experience I would recommend to always use 100%; To me using  200% on a 4K display  everything appears to be too soft. 

 

The picture discussed in this thread does also appear SOLD on my 4k monitor. 

 

By the way, the 100% rule does not dictate to using a specific monitor or resolution, technically the rule is fulfilled when looking at the picture @100% on any monitor. 

 

[M.Chapman]

41 minutes ago, hdh said:

 

By the way, the 100% rule does not dictate to using a specific monitor or resolution, technically the rule is fulfilled when looking at the picture @100% on any monitor. 

 

 

Agreed - providing that display is viewed from a distance and with eyesight that can just see the individual pixels.

[Martin P Wilson]

2 hours ago, arterra said:

 

"A little bit" will always look like a flaw. If it's your purpose to show the boat as a foreground out of focus "frame" then do so and exaggerate the effect so it looks OBVIOUS. 

When editing, I often blur parts of a picture in Photoshop so the sharp parts stand out even better. 

 

Cheers,

Philippe

 

Absolutely right, Alamy advised some while ago that it would be a SoLD fail if there was softness at 100% that was not clearly visible at the preview size - so the client did not get a nasty surprise when they downloaded the hi-res file. It explains why there are images with blur, even total, that have been accepted by Alamy. Apart from Alamy, how-to books and articles haved always advised that things like blur, wonky horizons etc should be very definite and clearly deliberate otherwise, as Phillippe says, they simply look like faults, bad technique.

[spacecadet]

As an aside, this is classic motion blur where I panned with the vehicle, shutter speed about 1/80. Only about a yard-wide circle around the chap looking at the camera is classically "sharp", but the intent is clear, so it passes QC. I have no hesitation about submitting images like this- I have a dozen or more here. Alamy know how photography works

To be fair, I did downsize this one to the minimum. I don't push my luck, except that I was lucky with this single frame because I wasn't on motor drive.

 

[Martin P Wilson]

4 hours ago, M.Chapman said:

Interesting. What sort of monitor are you using? If it's one of those very high pixel density displays e.g. 4k or Retina then your images may appear sharper than they are. The "image must appear sharp when viewed at 100%" rule assumes that the viewer has sufficiently good eyesight and is viewing at a distance where they can resolve individual image pixels. if you have a high pixel density display where you can't see the individual pixels you nay need to inspect at 200%. Alternatively check your monitor isn't applying any sharpening.

 

Mark

 

I was going to go for two 4k monitors until I realised I would not be able to see individual pixels when doingmy own QC at 100%. Saved a good chunk of money and went for 2560x1440. I wrote the thinking up about resolution on my blog.

[hdh]

6 hours ago, Martin P Wilson said:

 

I was going to go for two 4k monitors until I realised I would not be able to see individual pixels when doingmy own QC at 100%. Saved a good chunk of money and went for 2560x1440. I wrote the thinking up about resolution on my blog.

 

I would not want to do without the 4k monitor any more.

It speeds up my queue considerably, as I only need to scroll 3 to 5 times times to check the entire picture, instead of the 15+ times with 1920x1200 monitor. 

But as said before, when in doubt, I still use the low resolution monitor, to recheck  - assume this is for max 10% of the images. 

 

So far I did not have a QC fail - neither before nor after I started using the 4K monitor for QC.  

 

As for blurred or out of focus pictures, Alamy allows quite a range of that (there was also this thread bout this):

 

foreground massively blurred

  

 

Only eyes in focus, everything else is out of focus

 

Only camera shake, no focus at all

 

[spacecadet]

Yes, but no doubt the shake is sharp.

[hdh]

8 minutes ago, spacecadet said:

Yes, but no doubt the shake is sharp.

 - one of the sharpest I have ever done 

[Bryan]

On 17/08/2017 at 22:57, liverpix said:

Thanks for your replies and suggestions. It doesn't bother me if it's slightly soft in the foreground. The boat acts as a frame to the main part of the photo, the background, which is all sharp to me. I think lots of photos have just one part of it sharp and the rest of the photo blurred//soft (selective focus) - would Alamy fail all those photos ?

 

Agree with Wim, in the full size, downloaded, image the background is not sharp. This is not apparent in the original Flickr shot.

 

I suffered a few failures when I first started here, I had to up my game, and, fingers well and truly crossed, have not had a failure since.

[liverpix]

On 8/20/2017 at 07:00, M.Chapman said:

Interesting. What sort of monitor are you using? If it's one of those very high pixel density displays e.g. 4k or Retina then your images may appear sharper than they are. The "image must appear sharp when viewed at 100%" rule assumes that the viewer has sufficiently good eyesight and is viewing at a distance where they can resolve individual image pixels. if you have a high pixel density display where you can't see the individual pixels you nay need to inspect at 200%. Alternatively check your monitor isn't applying any sharpening.

 

Mark

Using the monitor that came with my laptop. Screen measures about 15 inches across diagonally,  Resolution only 1366 x  968. Short- sighted in my left eye, right eye is pretty good though. Please don't suggest Specsavers !

[wiskerke]

Here's a crop of a similar subject next to yours.

Both are at 100% Both are with a cheap zoom. Both are Sony cameras.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ijal23omlaimrou/sidebyside.jpg

Make sure you click the Fullscreen button and that the view is at 100%.

Mine is ok but not particularly sharp.

In another thread I offered this one as a sort of touchstone or yardstick with a very good standard lens and a good tripod.

Again: make sure you click the Fullscreen button and that the view is at 100%.

(If you read the whole thread, you'll see that there are things wrong with it, but not the sharpness.)

 

wim

[liverpix]

21 minutes ago, wiskerke said:

Here's a crop of a similar subject next to yours.

Both are at 100% Both are with a cheap zoom. Both are Sony cameras.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ijal23omlaimrou/sidebyside.jpg

Make sure you click the Fullscreen button and that the view is at 100%.

Mine is ok but not particularly sharp.

In another thread I offered this one as a sort of touchstone or yardstick with a very good standard lens and a good tripod.

Again: make sure you click the Fullscreen button and that the view is at 100%.

(If you read the whole thread, you'll see that there are things wrong with it, but not the sharpness.)

 

wim

Yeah, your photos do seem to be sharper. What standard lens did you use and on what camera for the second shot ?

[wiskerke]

8 minutes ago, liverpix said:

Yeah, your photos do seem to be sharper. What standard lens did you use and on what camera for the second shot ?

 

Both are with a A7R2 but at 100% it's comparing apples to apples because you're looking at the same pixels not the different size of the image.

The zoom lens is the Sony 28-70mm.

The standard lens is the Sony 55mm.

 

wim