Greetings And Apologies

Rabbet,

Welcome!

There are tons of discussions here on marketing, creating your best artist website,etc.Just do a search and then if you have more specific questions,ask away. Here's a thread that I started a while ago about the new Artist WS and how to "tweak" them:

http://fineartamerica.com/showmessages.php?messageid=2162019

Get comfortable!

Good Luck!

Rich

for one this is the main forum and not the group your messed up. but don't worry about it as the group owners (not all of them anyway), aren't as hyper as they are on other pod's. its easy to enough to remove things.

as for promotion its easier to check this forum, as there is too much to post and repost.

for now you'll want more keywords on things


check the quality on some, this may have printing issues. they are picky when it comes to printing. this one has a funky noise pattern to it.

while i don't like pinterest, i don't recommend turning the button off. people will take it one way or the other anyway. better to be in control of the link. mostly promotion is about building up who see's the things you pin, tweet, umm book?

sales take a while.


---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

The noises might be the clouds ;)

thanks Mike and Rich....

Having looked at several of your photographs I have to ask if you are upsizing them - making them larger. Many show noise in the sky. Difficult to avoid in low light - but creates a question about printing. Upsizing images may make it seem as if you can get a larger print - but it seldom works.

Nope I do not upsize but I will look more carefully to post processing to see if I am adding noise. Thanks!

also make sure your crop isn't upscaling it. some people add a DPI in the crop, and may be increasing a size without realzing it. or they crop a small section out of an image and make it larger that way. what i'm seeing in this is the compression noise clean up thing you would find in a smaller camera.


---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

I'm using a Lumix FZ70 mostly

Rabbet,

SOMETHING is happening! If you use the "green box" on this image you posted and the look, not in the sky,which is sometimes hard to see stuff, look over on the left side, on that ridgeline running up, almost vertically and you'll see signs of either up-sizing which the camera may be doing with that monster zoom you have, or somewhere else in the process.

Rich

Looks like Small Sensor + Digital Zoom + Compression.

I'd appreciate it if you would point out which photo(s) and that would help me evaluate my camera and situation.
I was taking a walk and thinking about he feedback here and the zoom might indeed be an issue and if you folks would point out specific photos
that would be most helpful.

Thanks so much!

nevermind.. I see the problem... thanks all for pointing it out.

Back to the drawing board so to speak.

Welcome Robert to FAA.

Welcome to FAA Robert.

mostly its good to check them now. because if they sell, and its rejected, you have a much smaller time frame to fix it - a day or two. and if you can't, you lose the sale. which is annoying. so if you can find a way to clean it, use median or some kind of anti noise. or maybe its the setting in the camera, then its a good idea to look into it. i try to point them out when i see it - while no one likes to hear it, before you send a 1000, its less frustrating with less stuff.

---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

Welcome Robert!

You have some nice pictures with some JPEG quality compression or scaling problems, as noted above. I notice that most of your photos are 4608 x 2592, which equates to about 12 megapixels. Some are smaller. Your camera is rated at 16.1 megapixels, so this doesn't look like an up sizing problem, unless all your images are crops. Are they cropped? Are they straight from the camera? What software was involved?

In Adobe Lightroom for example, exporting JPEGs with a low quality setting (meaning smaller file size and high compression) will show visual artifacts similar to what you are seeing here. Also, on my Canon camera, there is an option for a "Coarse", "Normal", and "Fine" JPEG quality setting. Using anything other than the "Fine" setting will result in similar noise. Also, make sure your ISO setting is as low as possible when shooting outdoors in good light.

I apologize if you already know these things...I'm just stabbing away hoping to hit at something.

I really like this image by the way.

Mike, I really do appreciate what you and everyone has offered so far.
Yes better to know now than later, and I am kicking myself
for a variety of reasons and wondering what to do with two six terabyte drives full of Lumix photos.
I guess it is a live and learn deal and I won't quit my day job that's for sure. I also put a limit on order-able sizes on
my site until I can see if there are any images that are salvageable.

I think I might also have some prints made to see what the end product is like and
save some bucks for something with a bigger sensor.

All great things for me to evaluate Kirkodd.
Thanks for your input as well.
I do use lightroom but I always make the output pix large and I do not
crop much....but there is some new learning I have to go through.
And some impatience to get over.

I will breath deeply, and not do anything drastic and perhaps go jump in the water tonight instead of
take more pix ;)

Rabbet,

Just crop a small portion of your image posted and then go get a print made,as large as you are offering and you'll see what we're talking about. An 8x10 will do. So enlarge your iamge to your largest size, crop an 8x10 out of it and get a print! Easy and cheap!

You're camera can shoot RAW and that's where you need to start, if you want to compete with other professionals,

Rich

Rich,

I know exactly what you are talking about and am looking at a few fixes.

The raw files on the Lumix are not normal raw files and the software that works with them is

funky to say the least.

thanks!

Rabbett

You might know this already, but this should help anyone who is fighting noise in Lightroom 5.

Assuming the camera settings are as good as they can get, and that the noise is visible in Lightroom, bumping the Noise Reduction: Luminance slider up to around 10 to 15 (out of a scale of 100) might help with reducing this type of noise. You can push it higher but you will have visible loss in sharpness in the fine details. If you need to use a lot of luminance noise reduction, you can boost the detail slider to get some of the fine detail back. Also, if you are using Lightroom's sharpening tool, you can make sure you aren't accidentally sharpening sensor noise by setting the mask slider to a higher value than the default (0). Holding ALT while sliding the sharpening mask slider makes it very apparent if you are or are not accidentally sharpening any existing noise, because Lightroom will display in white all the edges that are being sharpened as long as you are holding ALT while adjusting the sharpening mask. When we started out, I made the mistake of doing a lot of sharpening to the RAW images without setting a mask...the result was a bunch amplified sensor noise that looked mean enough to punch you in the face if the photo was printed much larger than a greeting card...

Thanks Kirkodd

I am experimenting with Topaz Denoise right now as a plugin in photoshop and am having some luck....

Almost time to hit the rack so I assume this will be a learning process as I try different things.

Appreciate the Lightroom tips.

Rabbett

welcome to FAA, Robert.

you can toss them into a painter program like DA painter. even running a water color or simplifier program will work wonders. you can also print them smaller, half size of whatever that is, should sell fine. just not the largest.


---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com