cave photos look like water color paintings?

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cave photos look like water color paintings?

Postby steven.millett » Nov 10, 2013 2:58 am

Hey,

On a recent caving trip, with my point and shoot sony cybershot camera, I thought I was taking nice clear photos but when I checked them on my PC, all cave formations and walls were blurred and looked like someone painted them by hand. I attached a couple photos. It was a very dry and warm cave in southern china and with very little moisture in the air it seemed the flash was working well. In addition, I used a chinese headlamp that I purchased to try and light the backgrounds better. This is what I think caused the problem. The 3W led headlamp has some interesting focusing lens on it and I set it to as wide as it would allow. Great, wide light, but I think somehow this screwed up the photos. Maybe something to do with not being in the far field of the focused light?

Has anyone ever seen anything like this before? Its not what I was hoping for but certainly came out interesting.
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Re: cave photos look like water color paintings?

Postby NZcaver » Nov 10, 2013 7:26 am

If it's not something you did in post-processing, could you have accidentally activated some gimmick image style feature the camera has?
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Re: cave photos look like water color paintings?

Postby Squirrel Girl » Nov 10, 2013 9:50 am

It's just a guess, but I *think* what the problem is, is that you didn't have enough light. If you used a flash, it just didn't have the power to light up the shot. So it's a very noisy shot. Maybe internal processing (or post processing) did an auto adjustment to compensate and that's your result. You could easily do a test by going in a dark room. Take a picture with a candle, then with a low power electric light, one with a flash and see what happens. Perhaps best is to go into a large dark room -- or hey, outside at night -- and take flash shot moving slowly in closer from, say 20' away and see what happens.

NZ is right, too. It's woefully easy to push the wrong button on many cameras. I have a new P&S where I'm doing that all the time.
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Re: cave photos look like water color paintings?

Postby batrotter » Nov 10, 2013 10:55 am

I shot some photos with the "low light" setting and they came out that way. They were not any good at all.
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Re: cave photos look like water color paintings?

Postby captnemo » Nov 10, 2013 10:04 pm

Looks to me like your resolution is set too low, what file size do you have the camera on? Can you post a full size image or the exif of the images? (a free exif viewer for firefox is available- https://addons.mozilla.org/EN-us/firefox/addon/fxif/ if you don't have software that displays it) heres a comparison to give you an idea why I believe that to be your problem:
Normal res picture:2112 x 3168(after cropping)
Image

Low res version: 1500 x 2250

Image

See how the low res version has the same blurred look as your images? It's even more noticeable when viewed at larger sizes:
http://captnemo.smugmug.com/Photography/Testing/Resolution-comparison/
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Re: cave photos look like water color paintings?

Postby NZcaver » Nov 11, 2013 5:01 am

captnemo wrote:Looks to me like your resolution is set too low, what file size do you have the camera on?

You may have nailed it right there. I should have thought of that :doh: but I've never set my cameras to anything but max/RAW.
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Re: cave photos look like water color paintings?

Postby Squirrel Girl » Nov 11, 2013 8:36 am

NZcaver wrote:You may have nailed it right there. I should have thought of that :doh: but I've never set my cameras to anything but max/RAW.

Ditto! :tonguecheek:
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Re: cave photos look like water color paintings?

Postby steven.millett » Nov 11, 2013 10:06 am

Hmm, I had the 7.2 mega pixel camera set to 3M, which I am assuming means only 3 mega pixels? Looking back, I should have increased it all the way to max, but I am still not convinced that is the problem. Jansen, I will email you some of the photos when I get back home this weekend, gmail is too painful to try and use over here for sending files. There some cases with high resolution and quality in some parts of the photo but poor in the background (rock walls or formations). This was my first time bringing this camera in a cave, so maybe I need some more practice with it.

Photos outside in daylight came out OK.


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Re: cave photos look like water color paintings?

Postby NZcaver » Nov 11, 2013 2:24 pm

Sure Steve, send me one of your cave photos and one of your outdoor photos - preferably with the same image quality settings. Hope you're both having a nice time in China. :waving:
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Re: cave photos look like water color paintings?

Postby captnemo » Nov 11, 2013 3:46 pm

Even the daylight photo shows blurring/rounded edges which could be from low resolution though not as marked. 3MP is considered fairly low especially depending on the amount of jpeg compression applied and as previously mentioned any processing the camera does for low light will accentuate this.
You should have settings in the menu for resolution e.g. • 3072 x 2304,• 3072 x 2048 (3:2),• 2592 x 1944 etc and for jpeg setting eg fine/std(standard).
For best results you want highest res and fine jpeg(least compression).
Hope that helps.
John
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Re: cave photos look like water color paintings?

Postby LukeM » Nov 14, 2013 4:39 pm

Steve, it looks like because of the low light the camera was forced to use some insanely high ISO (like 3200) and then because of the horrifying amounts of high-iso/low light noise in the image the built in noise-reduction algorithm had to go at it with a hatchet.

Unfortunately, many compact cameras with small image sensors compensate for having poor low light performance by throwing lots of processing at them rather than letting you choose how you want it in post. Raising the resolution may have helped achieve a better result because the noise reduction may be poorly tuned for low res images, but the primary problem appears to be low light combined with a small image sensor and heavy handed noise reduction software.

I've seen this sort of thing when I use noise reduction in post and crank it up higher than I should.

Checking the image metadata to see what the ISO was would help confirm this.
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