Commons:Photography critiques/April 2015

Acantholimon acerosum

A shot of Acantholimon acerosum I took in the Botanical Gardens of Berlin (whole plant looks something like this). I know, focus point is not ideal and maybe F11 would've been better, but how bad do you think it is? Also, does it "work" for you as a picture in general? Please don't hold back … --El Grafo (talk) 14:27, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

• I disagree, for this specific composition I think the DoF is too big and make the background too predominant. -- Christian Ferrer 20:12, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

  @Christian Ferrer: Interesting thought, thanks for that! I'm mainly bothered by the out-of-focus twigs (or how do you call that?) in the foreground, so maybe focusing a bit closer plus wider aperture could've done the trick. --El Grafo (talk) 07:47, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

• This aperture can be acceptable, IMO even a lowest could be, however a focus point nearer from you (on the first plants) would maybe have been better, indeed. -- Christian Ferrer 11:00, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

Review photo, please

I did this photo with Hugin, I used 6 photos, and I like to another user review it and sign on it possibly perspective issues and other mess, Regards!!! --Ezarateesteban 22:51, 12 April 2015 (UTC)

@Ezarate: I've marked some stitching errors which broke some of the power lines. Also, there is a white border at the left side of the image. Not sure about the perspective yet – the wooden pole holding the power lines does actually lean to the left in reality, right? --El Grafo (talk) 07:58, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

Cropping around a painting

I need some help of which is the best way to present a painting with unfavourable background. I decided to crop as closely as possible this one, but there are some spots that the background is apparent and others that is too tight. What do you propose? (I also have a problem with the yellow highlights in this one, but I tried to develop it with RawTherapee but the end result was not very pleasing as far as colours is concerned (and it also looked more blurred) --C messier (talk) 16:55, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

@C messier: It seems that your camera/lens has produced a bit of barrel distortion. Hence, the frame is not rectangular anymore and if you crop tight at the corners you lose parts of the frame at the centers. You could try to find a correction profile for your camera or correct the lens distortion manually (e.g. in RawTherapee). After that, cropping should be easier. (Maybe a bit of rotation and/or perspective correction is needed as well, but I'd start with the barrel distortion and see how far that brings you).

I wouldn't worry about the highlights too much, but if you want to tune them down it might be better to try local adjustments instead of working on the whole image. Afaik, that's not possible in RawTherapee, though. Personally, I'd use the good old Lightzone (a bit outdated, but Open Source since Version 4) for that, but something like Gimp should work as well. More importantly, due to the uneven lighting coming from the top, the bottom half seems a little dark. I'd suggest brightening the lower portion of the painting, using a long vertial gradient to achieve even lighting across the whole frame.

Hope that helps a bit, --El Grafo (talk) 10:05, 17 April 2015 (UTC)