Wikipedia:Picture peer review/Chambord

Chambord

I took this panorama of 4 combined images. It doesn't (yet) exist in any articles, but it could find a home in Château de Chambord.

As I'm very new to panoramas, I'm interested to hear what I could do better, or what would make a photo like this more interesting for Wikipedia.

Strengths of this photo:

Detail is good (but not fantastic)
Subject is nice
I've carefully centred it and straightened it (maybe could crop a little more grass off the bottom)
No clones :)

Weaknesses:

Sky still sickly looking despite my photoshopping :)
Lighting pretty dull - was pretty much midday :(
Little people in centre of photo are distracting.
Colouring a little off - stone is actually quite white irl.

Comments please! Stevage 22:52, 3 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Comments:

Comment: You seem to have done a good job of the stitching, which looks very consistent. I'm not quite so convinced about the straightness - to my eyes it's slanted to the right slightly. Using the Grid in Photoshop shows that the wall in the middle ground is higher on the left than the right (not having been there I can't say whether that's the geography of the place) but the Chateau looks fairly straight - maybe cropping some more of that grass would move the strong not-quite-horizontal line away from the middle of the image and lessen the effect.
Before you do that though, I hope you've kept the original (unedited) panorama, as your efforts with the sky seem to have introduced some funny little white 'streamers' in the sky, haloes round the trees and in places strange effects at the edges of the building. These would certainly lose it my vote for featured, but should be avoidable with careful editing of the original. At full resolution, the image also looks very 'smooth', as though the Dust & Scratches filter has been overused... but on the whole not bad for a first try and with a bit more work, I think this has potential. If you could post the original for comparison people might be able to give you some better pointers on how to make it look its best :) Yummifruitbat 01:15, 4 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Original version, no touching up at all.

Ah, good thoughts - I'm really not good on postprocessing. I used PaintShopPro's magic "fix it all" button (whatever it's called), which as you point out, has a smoothing step. For comparison, here's the original, fresh out of the stitching program. All compliments for good stitching go to AutoStitch. Note that the ground was even wonkier in this version. Perhaps it needs perspective correction? Stevage 06:53, 4 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've spent a bit of time working on your original and uploaded it for comparison. The steps I took were: straighten using grid; correct (pincushion) distortion; slight adjustment to centering and crop a little of the sky and grass; brightness/contrast; highlights/shadows (shadow boost, colour correction and midtone contrast); a very slight Smart Sharpen. I couldn't do very much with the sky because of the trees on the horizon and the fact that there's not very much detail there (it's blown out, particularly on the right hand side, and has suffered from the dreaded JPEG compression artifacts). However, I don't think that the sky detracts too much from the image, as the subject is after all the Château which is pretty well exposed. What do you think? Is the colour of the stonework any better? Cheers --Yummifruitbat 21:52, 6 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Looks great - I tried several times to straighten it, but it always seemed to be leaning to the right, even when what I was measuring said it wasn't. Pity about the Jpeg artefacts - must remember to take photos like that on high quality mode (Fuji Finepix F10, the high quality mode doubles the size of the image). I'll nominate for the hell of it. Stevage 22:20, 6 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It's a long time since I used PSP, so I can't remember if there's a Grid function, but I generally find it easiest to straighten images by overlaying the grid and then following a vertical/horizontal reference in the image along the nearest grid line to see if it's aligned. I wouldn't worry about the JPEG artifaction, it's not really an issue in the finished image IMO, but it became obvious if I tried to boost the contrast or saturation of the sky which is why I left it as it was. Yummifruitbat 22:38, 6 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Seconder: I think it's probably worth trial by fire anyway... :) --Yummifruitbat 22:38, 6 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Did you try Hugin (software) ti stitch this? --128.131.219.28 23:42, 6 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]