[Soupdragon]

Citique absolutely welcome.

[danpen]

I like the two tone background, nicely blurred. You're never going to get enough DoF for a shot at that angle and so need to ensure that all the most important bits are really sharp, it could be the jpeg conversion but the eyes seem very slightly soft. Good focus on the abdomen though.

I have lots of questions about this image was captured, what camera/lens did you use, how close were you, did you use flash, how cropped is it, has it been processed?

Dragonflies are not the easiest subject (don't I know it) and this is a really good effort.

[Soupdragon]

Thanks for the comments, the camera was an eos 350 with just the bog standard plastic 18-55 milk bottle bottom.
On my monitor with the image un-compressed (45mb tif) it is very much sharper.
It looks on the warm side but then it was taken very late afternoon.
It is a crop of about one quarter of the original image.
I originally went out to catch one in flight, and to some extent did, but I don't think the image is of a high enough standard to post.

[skipper954]

I like the composition here, with the double diagonals (actually triple). The focus does seem a bit soft, though. I would really like to see the bright colors and patterns on the thorax crystal clearly.

It is too bad that here, the file is so small (only 32 KB)? That is why you lost detail.

What image processor do you use? If photoshop, see the comments under my submission, "serenity" and don't compress to 72 ppi. Hope this help.

[Soupdragon]

Originally Posted by skipper954

I like the composition here, with the double diagonals (actually triple). The focus does seem a bit soft, though. I would really like to see the bright colors and patterns on the thorax crystal clearly.

It is too bad that here, the file is so small (only 32 KB)? That is why you lost detail.

What image processor do you use? If photoshop, see the comments under my submission, "serenity" and don't compress to 72 ppi. Hope this help.

I am a bit of a dummy with PS, I can just about manage sharpening, contrast and saturation.
ALl my pictures seem "lack lustre" when compressed for the net.

[Dave]

Note you can go to 200K on here & 1000 pixel max length, so should stand a better chance than 32K

[danpen]

Originally Posted by Soupdragon

I am a bit of a dummy with PS, I can just about manage sharpening, contrast and saturation.
ALl my pictures seem "lack lustre" when compressed for the net.

I'd love to see a less compressed version, I'm a sucker for a dragonfly.

There's a fairly easy way to prepare images if you have PS CS2, get the colours, contrast and crop right and save your image, don't sharpen at this stage. Then choose:

• "File=>Automate=>Fit Image", type 1000 for both width and height (it'll crop the longest side to 1000 and scale the other accordingly)
• Then run "filter=>sharpen=>smart sharpen" and fiddle with the controls 'til it looks right (no magic numbers here)
• Then choose save for web, your image dimensions are already correct so just adjust the quality slider until the size is under 200K
• Save this low res version under a different filename and upload it.

There are many other ways to skin a cat and ways to tweak an image to get it better but this will give reasonable results pretty easily.

[Soupdragon]

Thanks for the mini tutorial!, I'd give it a go but, I got my first yellow card from the administrators today (totally my fault) I am only allowed to post one picture a day for critique.
Rules is rules and I don't want to get ticked off again so soon.

[danpen]

I may be wrong but I don't think they'd mind you adding a better version of this image to this thread.

[P-E]

What I do is same as danpen but in the optimized file size box I put in what I want my file size to be which is usually 160K for web.

So every time I save for web I just click the optimized file size which adjusts the quality slider automatically.

[namllihs]

I never seem to get one that is still long enough for me to focus

[danpen]

Originally Posted by P-E

What I do is same as danpen but in the optimized file size box I put in what I want my file size to be which is usually 160K for web.

So every time I save for web I just click the optimized file size which adjusts the quality slider automatically.

I didn't even know you could do that, I don't think I'll ever stop finding out more about this product. Thanks.

[Soupdragon]

I had another go, what do you think?

[stepheno]

That's better. You've lost some of the blown highlights as well

[danpen]

I agree, much better. A great shot.