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Striations in pictures

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Rusty1963

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Joined: Apr '10
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Hi

I'm not sure if this topic has been discussed before so I'm going to open it here.

In my photostream http://www.flickr.com/photos/kadeyimaging/ There are a number of photos that have striations in certain areas. The notable ones are "road to Chart farm" and "cloud." Chart farm has the striations around the light source and Cloud has them in the sky around the cloud.

Chart farm was taken with a D300s 50mm prime at f1.8 and ISO 400.
Cloud was taken with a D300s Sigma 18-200 at 80mm and f5.3 and ISO 100.

I thought that these were due to my processing on a non-HD computer - Chart farm, but Cloud was processed in HD.

I have gone to the RAW files and reverted them and I have found that the striations exist even in the RAW as it came from the Camera.

What causes this effect, what are the solutions?

Posted 3 years ago #
heartyfisher

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Beautiful pictures and The self portrait shows a beautiful soul well done!

You are talking about the banding in the transitions in hues? I am also not sure what you mean by processing in HD?

These things usually occur when you dont have enough bits to represent reality. So you need to have your jpeg set to the highest quality. the RAW files should not have these bandings. Do you still have your RAW file? post one of them up for us if you dont mind. Finally when you save the file you need to use less compression, these banding occur when you use higher compressions. and I think flickr uses a fairly high compression when it resizes for display.

Posted 3 years ago #
David

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Joined: Mar '10
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Beautiful photos... on the slight 'bandings', perhaps you over-cooked your jpegs. You should not be getting those on normal settings. +contrast & +sharpening at reasonable levels? Alternatively, the PP software default settings were changed?

Posted 3 years ago #
Rusty1963

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Thanks, will gladly put up a RAW file but not sure how to do it.

Posted 3 years ago #
jonnyapple

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If you can email a raw file to me (maybe that road to chart farm one), I'll post it for you. jonnyp427 at yahoo is the address.

It could just be that you don't have enough shades of red in 8 bits to reproduce that gradient without posterizing.

Great shots, by the way, Rusty. You've got a good eye.

Posted 3 years ago #
jbl

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There's no such thing as a non-HD Computer.. at worse, the computer is slow and it will take ages to do your post-processing, that's it.

In photography terms, HD doesn't mean crap because 1 mega-pixel is already in HD (in terms of pixel resolution, aka the real meaning of HD)... so yeah. This term was only invented to sell more crap, they even sell "HD sunglasses" now...

If it's in the raw file from the camera, then it has nothing to do with flickr or your post processing routine, that's good to know. It's either the sensor or the lens.

Back on topic, I have no idea how a raw file can have this kind of flaw in its data, it's something I generally see when I compress/downsize/post process my images.. and mostly when I turn pictures into video... otherwise I never experienced that issue.

Good luck.

Posted 3 years ago #
Rusty1963

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Must disagree, there are computers that have HD displays and those that don't.

The quality of a picture viewed on a normal LCD screen will seem different to the same picture viewed on a HD screen.

Whether or not this is theoretically impossible, I see a difference, maybe it's the quality of the screen?

Posted 3 years ago #
Rusty1963

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Thanks for all your compliments, I can't get out of the door now!!

Lol

Posted 3 years ago #
NikoDoby

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It's the resolution of the screen and color settings.

What kind of "HD" computer do you have Rusty?

Posted 3 years ago #
jonnyapple

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Here's the NEF file for anyone who's interested. Thanks, Gavin.

Rusty1963's 'road to Chart farm' NEF (10MB)

Posted 3 years ago #
Rusty1963

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I know that you asked what kind of HD computer I had, but I'm sure that you really meant HD display. Processing power only gets the results out faster and allows for more multi-tasking.

I have a Fujitsu -Siemens full HD screen and a LG LCD screen.

Both are used as the displays on my PC and run from the same graphics card which is an Nvidia Gtx260.

The settings used for both are the manufacturers defaults. I have my photographs play as a slideshow for the screen saver, and aside from the slight "ballooning" effect of the elongated pixels on the HD screen, the quality always seems better on that screen.

Posted 3 years ago #
adamz

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Joined: Mar '09
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agree with jbl - there's no such thing as HD computer, You can process even the biggest pictures on cheap boxes with crt screens - this doesn't influence Your pictures. however, this what can influence Your PP is Your software, and especially the image export settings. if You don't trust our "golden child" with Your raw files, send one to me :D

Posted 3 years ago #
jonnyapple

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Hey, what's not to trust, Adam?

BTW, Rusty, I hope you don't mind that I added my name and email to the creator field of your NEF that I posted. I thought I should get something out of all this. (Just kidding! I didn't.)

Posted 3 years ago #
Rusty1963

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It's okay, I have another copy.......

Posted 3 years ago #
jonnyapple

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Hahaha! The beauty of digital, right?

Posted 3 years ago #
heartyfisher

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Had a look at the NEF .. There is no striations/banding there .. So it looks like its your post processing that is causing this banding.

There was a post some time ago concerning the types of monitors you can get for your PC. I just got a dell ultrasharp and that makes a huge difference for me when viewing pictures. HD does not have anything to do with the quality of the colours. I had a 23" HD monitor and that was horrible in terms of colours.

Posted 3 years ago #
NikoDoby

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What color space are you doing your post processing in? It seems like you are switching to another color space to post these online and that's causing the banding. It's not the camera.

Monitor is useless unless it's properly color calibrated regardless of the price or specs.

Posted 3 years ago #
jonnyapple

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I think the underscore at the beginning of the NEF file means that you shoot in Adobe RGB. I would switch to sRGB unless you know why you wouldn't want to use it, Rusty.

I processed the NEF in lightroom 2 and in viewNX and don't see the banding in either:
LR2 processing
ViewNX processing

If you want the long reason why you should probably stay in sRGB, Adobe RGB is a wider gamut (covers more colors) so you're spreading the 8 bits (256 possible levels) in each channel over a lot more colors, and you can make fewer colors within the visible color gamut. That can mean posterization in subtle gradients. 16-bit files (65,536 possible levels per channel) don't have that problem, but jpeg doesn't support 16 bits. I think a good rule of thumb is that whenever you're going to convert from 16 to 8 bits you should make sure you're no longer in a wide gamut like Adobe RGB or Adobe prophoto.

Posted 3 years ago #
NikoDoby

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Yup processing in Adobe RGB and then converting "downward" to sRGB is definitely the culprit for the posterization. Short answer is that you use Adobe RGB when you are going to do a multicolor print through a professional printer as in you are printing your photos in a brochure or book for example. Otherwise if you are just printing at a local supermarket, drugstore, home printer or just displaying your work online then stick to sRGB.

Posted 3 years ago #
heartyfisher

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ok found the previous thread about monitors http://nikonrumors.com/forum/topic.php?id=426

my ultrasharp is one of those IPS type monitors.. yes it has a slight deep purple hue when viewed from about 20-30 degrees but most people wont notice it.. its cool that I can view the contents of my screen at 10-20 degrees at all! :-)

Posted 3 years ago #
bmxdad

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I have only used sRGB also, thanks for explaining why I should stick to that

Pete

Posted 3 years ago #
Rusty1963

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Thanks for all your input, I will revert to sRGB as opposed to Adobe.

I started using Adobe because I figured that if I was processing in Adobe software, it may be more practical/synchronous to use that setting.

Thanks again all.

Gavin

Posted 3 years ago #
NikoDoby

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Abobe RGB is just named "in honor" of Adobe since they developed it for use on their applications, but it doesn't mean that you should only use Adobe RGB when using Adobe products.

Posted 3 years ago #

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Striations in pictures

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