More images from Namibia

[Guest]

A few more very different images:

The sand dunes in Namibia are the largest in the world

Nearly at the top of Big Ma Ma! Not the largest dune though.

Desert Jackal, scrounging around the deserted car park for scraps of food

Namibian farmers transport. These mules provide excellent traction power for the hot and dusty tracks. We stopped to provide them with some of our water in exchange for a photo shoot. Both were well received!

Springboks in the desert. Amazingly the Namib desert supports a variety of animal species, including elephant and the occasional giraffe

[brian1208]

Re: More images from Namibia

the images aren't showing Dave?

[Bikie John]

Re: More images from Namibia

They are here, and it's only just up the road. Very nice they are too

John

[brian1208]

Re: More images from Namibia

My word Dave, those are a bit special

Those sand dunes take me back to a short period of working Qatar, they can look stunning in the right light and the sense of scale in the second one is excellent

[Gwyver]

Re: More images from Namibia

Dave,
Splendid images but - and I hope you won't mind me mentioning it - something isn't right with how they display on this site. There's a noticeable 'oversharpening halo' on the horizon of the first shot and something similar on the last and the second. Perhaps it arises because of the file compression used when photos are uploaded to the Gallery?

[Alpha1]

Re: More images from Namibia

Sorry about that! I saw the halo on the dunes on the unsharpened raw file too, and inspected it by zooming in on my 27" screen and discovered that they are in fact natural serrations as the dunes are not smooth at the ridge but made up of little "mini dunes" where the wind has piled up the sand at the top. Very difficult to walk and keep balance from about 80% onwards!

I will look at the others that you mention again, although I have to say that the compression quality to get them down from large Tiff files to 160mb required for the gallery does mean a compression quality down to 2 or 3 sometimes!

Unlike the exhibition files that I frequently send for on-line transmission that are much larger pixel dimensions and sent at 300dpi minimum compression instead of 72dpi maximum compression for web work.

[Bikie John]

Re: More images from Namibia

I will look at the others that you mention again, although I have to say that the compression quality to get them down from large Tiff files to 160mb required for the gallery does mean a compression quality down to 2 or 3 sometimes!

Dave - if you Save as.... (PS and such like) or Export (LR and friends) to save your downsized files as JPEGs they come out quite big. In Photoshop I use "Save for web..." which optimises for web display and produces much smaller files while keeping high quality. I imagine it does it by restricting the gamut which in turn will allow more compression without compromising sharpness and detail.

I haven't found a direct equivalent to "Save for web" in LR. If I can't be bothered to go via PS I just generate a Lightroom web gallery and save it locally then dig out the image files from the /content/images/large folder.

Both methods allow you to set a quality parameter, which in turn determines file size. PS gives more explicit control than LR. Both methods also give some degree of control over how much of the original EXIF data is saved in the files. Since I publish a lot of stuff on Faecesbook I usually strip out all the EXIF except Copyright.

Ciao ... John

[Alpha1]

Re: More images from Namibia

OK John,

This is a massively cropped detail of the top of the dune with people climbing up (part of our group actually!) in front of the leading person (another David)
is virgin dune surface and behind is his foot marks in the sand.

I have saved the image after cropping etc as you have described using save for web in CS6

A teenage Damar girl. A really nice lass to speak with, spoke excellent english in addition to her native language which is done with a clicking sound from the back of the tongue

Then the rest of the village tribal dance group, putting on a little show for us:

[Bikie John]

Re: More images from Namibia

There is certainly something rather odd happening with the dune pic. All that patterning going on in the sky and the sand looks distinctly strange. The jaggies along the horizon are no problem if it's really like that, but it still looks to me as if you have got a bit of sharpening halo from somewhere.

If you're working from E-M1 raw files, I wonder if the "preliminary" support provided by Adobe is not serving you well. As well as the GA release of Lightroom 5.3 mentioned in Brian's thread, I got notification of an update to Adobe Camera Raw (as used by Photoshop) this morning. Maybe it's worth doing the update, then resetting all the parameters and starting afresh. There was someone here, sorry I can't remember who but they do a lot of portrait work, who felt the colour rendition from the preliminary Adobe versions was poor, specially with skin tones. Perhaps they have ironed out some glitches now.

All that aside - a lovely set of photos. Did you find that the "Save for web..." version can be significantly smaller for the same quality? I think I usually set the quality slider to about 70 as it seems a good compromise.

Ciao ... John

[Alpha1]

Re: More images from Namibia

John, the cropped detail of the summit is really a very much magnified view and if I did the same magnification on one of my exhibition winning images they show a similar pattern. However I will update my PS CS6 and and have another look at it. Thanks for letting me know about it.

By the way you will be relieved to learn that these are positively the last of my Namibian images that I will post!

[Alpha1]

Re: More images from Namibia

Well just one more then, especially for John!

Same image re-processed using latest profile update in PS CS6.

Somewhat improved, so thank you John!

[Bikie John]

Re: More images from Namibia

That looks a lot healthier, it looks like Adobe have made a big improvement. Thanks for the update Dave.

I will not be relieved at all if these are last we see from your Namibian odyssey - I think they are very interesting, and well taken and presented.

Ciao ... John

[gregles]

Re: More images from Namibia

Really interesting series of shots Brian. Loving the shots of the dunes for their sheer scale and form and the water exchange shot too

Like John - I am looking forward to seeing more please

Greg

[brian1208]

Re: More images from Namibia

Umm - they are Dave's shots Greg (but I do agree, they make a really interesting series )

[Chevvyf1]

Re: More images from Namibia

Dave, superb images and what fun I lurve the detail in the Dune sand

and it is so VERY NICE to see well fed villagers a change from the starving images around this time of year !

any more ?