Brian Swale wrote:
> At the bottom of this page (now 3MB, sorry) I have added 6 of the original
> shots (E-1 & Zuiko 50/3.5 macro, mostly wide open); the only changes I did
> was resize to width 500 pixels, and cut the file size down to no more than
> 140 kb (all in FastStone).
>
I think you are either doing your images a disservice with your
downsizing strategy or suing up unnecessary disk space. By focusing on
file size, you relatively penalize the vertical images and images with
more detail/sharpness. The horizontals are only 56% of the size of the
verticals. And images with more detail naturally come out lager on disk
than those with less.
A better strategy might be to choose a quality level that provides the
combination of IQ and size you like on average, then apply that to
saving all JPEGs.
> This should give you a before and after impression of what I was able to do
> with FastStone. For what it's worth !
>
I've said it before. Now I've actually tried it. I love Fast Stone for
the things it does well. But it is NOT a real image editor. I couldn't
do much, if any better, than you did with a couple of these images.
Basic tools just aren't there. That doesn't mean a proper editor, even a
fairly limited one, couldn't do much better.
<http://www.moosemystic.net/Gallery/Others/BSwale/PB157169.htm>
Looking at IrfanView, I can't see even minimal editing tools, although I
don't entirely understand the interface. I seem to have permanently lost
the menu bar.
It looks to me like the Balloon Man image is fairly well exposed. The
camera doesn't know whether highlights or shadows are more important to
you, so it makes a compromise within the contrast setting you have
chosen, highly compressing the top and bottom ends. Using an ORF file
with the same exposure and a decent RAW converter, the full range of
brightness should be available to you.
Moose
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