* Wednesday C&C "No Theme" Thread #890 / Revived #110 on 2025 05 07*

it's an interesting image with a lot going on in it. It took a few seconds for me to understand the room layout. EDIT: I forgot to mention I really like this kind of images showing people at every day activities. This image is basically good and I gave it a long look. /EDIT

Then my eye landed, of course, on the foremost lady and her left hand. Hmm.
This is strange. The woman does partly look AI generated but the light and her place suggest she is a normal human. Than again there are so many shady details and scrolling around I was fascinated by a some of them:
The rim of the glasses maybe goes straight into the ear canal.
The eyebrows are otherworldly.
The eyelashes have become one long black thing made of something not looking like hair.
The first joint of the left little finger is further out from the hand than the first joint of the ring finger.
On her right index finger, she has a ring that sits between the first and second joints instead of before the first joint.
The left index finger is deformed.
All fingertips of the right hand are strange.

Then I also started to wonder why she works that steel cup upon a surface of glass and also without holding the cup. At that point I felt I was getting paranoid.
All that happened yesterday. Today I read this is a result from noise treatment.
May I suggest letting ISO1600 images be a bit noisy, it can't be that bad in reasonably sized images. At least not as frightening as the poor young woman.

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Wow! Even a double wow!
What a great idea and how well executed all the way from the signs to the website. The story is well written and illustrated and the net result is that I start to think about visiting the area next time I'm in Munich. It cant be that far? If the goal was to lure people to visit the goal is achieved.
The second wow is about the image of the two guys in a rowingboat. Märchenhaften indeed!
Perhaps i could wish for the images showing the images on display to show a little more of the area around the great images. OK, by then you understand you got me curious.
Great work!

The first impression of an image you get here is always from a very small preview. If there hadn't been the text telling me it was taken a rainy day I would have scrolled by and forgotten the image quickly enough. In the small preview version it doesn't work.
The small format amplifies the negative sides of the image.
Looking at the image larger changes things for me. Now you can see the water drops and the focus is moved from nowhere to the air intake at the lower front. It turned more interesting at the same time as the disturbing background gets less disturbing. I hope you get what I mean:
In the small format it's just a car. A nice car but just a car. An image of "just an car" needs a better background. Now the right side (which is looking better together with the yellow car than the left side) become the strange part of the image. That is weird. In the small format it also doesn't help that the image is taken with the camera at the dead center of the car. Larger it doesn't matter that much as the background gets less interesting and the eye stays on the car.
Ah, something like that.

Wow again! Here we got another well told story with supporting images. The many images hints about the many different styles of these dwarfs. This is fun.
Thank you for the great story!

(We stayed, a very short stop on our way south, for a day (two nights) in Wroclaw 20 years ago. I and my better half were traveling Poland, camping for two weeks. In Wroclaw we stayed at a kind of olympic site close to Hotel Olympic. I had never heard of olympic games in Wroclaw but understand the site was used for something during the Olympic games in Germany 1936 (and Wroclaw was Breslau in eastern Germany).
We took a tram to the city center for walking and eating and I don't recall having seen a single dwarf. Did we just miss them or were they not there? Or, were we in the wrong part of the town? Sorry for the digress but I find it a bit annoying having missed 800 dwarfs.)

(double posted by mistake, can be removed
/Jonas)

Initial reaction: Nice street. Wooden buildings. That wasn't a common sight in Istanbul as I recall it. Am I right thinking the purpose of this image is to show the row of nice wooden buildings to the right?

A second look: The image somehow exudes perfection. The exposure and the tonality are good, the lines are straight and i get a feeling the vantage point is carefully chosen. What is there to say about it? Is it in need of a human being making it interesting (as commented above)? I don't think so, I can be perfectly happy with the buildings only as a sort of documentary shot. But then, as a such, it isn't perfect. The sunshine comes from the behind. Together with the blue sky this lends the houses a bluish tone, a discoloration. This isn't seen at the first sight as the depth lures the eye away to the background and the left side of the image is nice if perhaps a tad blueish.

Would it be possible to shoot from another angle, perhaps not exactly right on but closer to right on skipping the current far away background? At a day with more clouds making it easier to get good light and colors? I'm sure the third house from the right is more lively colored than we can see now.
This is the first time i have seen an image of interest on the net in the Display P3 color space. Is there an idea behind this choice? I ask as anyone with a system not color managed will get even more pale colors.

Thanks for taking the time to look and comment.

You spent almost as much concern with the way this site displays image thumbnails as with the image itself. For a site interested in display of images, the design couldn't be worse than if the thumbnail were just a blank gray placeholder. I have never been able to come up with an image resolution that results in the thumbnail doing the full image justice. Sometimes the thumbnail displays very small, sometimes, half the screen width. I'll resist further comment about the site design.

Always view images here at full size. And set up your browser to allow full screen display, if possible. I'm amazed that anyone viewing images here on anything but a large screen can get any appreciation for image quality.

The car was captured in somewhat challenging conditions. It was dismal, heavily overcast, raining. (Actually some of my favorite shooting conditions)

It was parked in a cramped space with overhanging trees on one side, making framing it difficult. I had no control over the background.

It's amazing how low to the ground Corvettes are. One must be almost lying supine while driving. I was crouched, balancing on my toes, doing my best not to put one knee down on the soaked turf, trying to line up things as symmetrically as possible. (And I'm pleased how well that worked out)

The combination of a 50mm lens on a medium format camera resulted in a very "wide angle" perspective, giving a car designed to look threatening, muscular and lean, a cartoonish, rounded, child-like "face." IMHO.

The smoke-gray headlight covers, meant to further the menacing look of the car, add to the appearance of cartoonish, elf-like eyes.

I think the little fellow is smiling slightly, asking to be let back in the house so he can get dry.

Rich

My own frustrations with this kind of outcome has led me to almost give up on Topaz as a solution. It has got worse instead of better after they combined their noise reduction with the sharpening and named it Topaz AI. It's harder to control now too. I get less weirdness with OnOne noise removal or the secondary noise removal tool in Lightroom. One of my Topaz outcomes of my teenage grandson playing soccer makes him look so devil possessed that he wanted it made into a horror-movie type poster.

I am so glad I have not upgraded from my (old, separate) copies of Topaz Sharpen and Gigapixel AI. I use Sharpen very judiciously, and check every last pixel before showing any sharpened image.

Rich

Oh yes, I look at nearly all images as full size as possible using a 32" 4K screen and a color managed system. Cars are usually of little interest to me but the mention of a rainy day made me click further.
Reading your comment make me understand the troubles you had taking the image and I hope you got another audience with the sense to appreciate it more than I did at first.
Leaving all that aside - your comment about a rainy day series of images sounds promising. Maybe we will see more from it?

To my eyes it appears that the thumbnail/preview algorithm discards too many of the "extreme" values as outlier values and the result is a muddier composite of the more average values. It removes the sparkle from the ring, so to speak. It really makes quite a mess of some of the images posed here to my eyes, making them look flat and giving the appearance of a colour cast in some (if you lose the outlying tones in a predominantly warm image then you lose the cool whites and an average value loses much of slight but necessary blue).

Thanks very much.

Here's my first post from the SoCal Rainy Day series: dprevived.com/t/wednesday-cc-no-theme-thread-887-revived-107-on-2025-04-16/7167/#post-100067

I'll post more later.

Rich

Thank you. Yes, that was more to my taste, interesting! Maybe not smashing but the leftmost, and to some extent also the one to the right had me look for some time. Inspiring. Triptychs are hard (at least for me). Maybe I'll try one for next Wednesday.

Hi Alan

Status update,….

Over a month ago I started a post to show a method how users can post images and get a “preview” with a much better, high res quality (link)

This method works fine, but does have the disadvantages that it is a bit tricky for the user to use, and the threads would generally load somewhat slower on slow internet connections.
The better solution was obviously to just improve the quality of the previews, so that everyone can use them with no extra effort for the user.
…So I started to work with Arvo to find a set of settings that have an optimum balance between making the previews look much better and allowing the webpage to load reasonably fast.
After a few experiments, Arvo found those optimal settings, and they have been approved by the admins.

These settings now “just” need to be changed in the website code.
But there is apparently no time for this ☹
I have no idea if this change of settings is easy to do, or perhaps a much more complex task?
Or, perhaps someone else could help make the change ?

Waiting for some “new version” would push this good (approved) quality improvement out to some unknown distant future ☹
Is there a chance to get this done in the current version?

Jonas,

Again, thanks for looking and taking time to comment.

I've had a career preparing and presenting images for viewing. As a graphic designer and commercial printer, placing images on the printed page was a job and a labor of love.

The space in which an image is presented has as much impact on the viewer as the image itself. I would often spend many times the cost of the job getting the layout right and the look as pleasing as possible. Blowing way past the profit in the job was almost a routine thing as the real cost of actually getting ink on paper was (is) often an afterthought in any customer's thought process (an individual or a corporation) putting together a flyer or a corporate report.

But in the end, job after job, my reputation was on display, every time.

I've posted diptychs and triptychs on this site (they're assembled in Photoshop as multiple images, then flattened to a single entity) as a way to try to "control" the white space of the page around the image. White space can make or break an image.

My method works to some extent. The three images of Agave work for my eye for reasons very different from the reactions of any individual viewer. If I (we) could actually control the page display the way a photography site should actually work, I could make each of these images as stand alone and appear more pleasing. But the multiple image layout has other advantages of its own.

I can do all that on my own Web site on which I'm still working. Maybe one day I'll post a link. Thank goodness Square Space is so attuned to the esthetics of image display and site design. Agave exists there both as a triptych and as individual images.

Please do continue to contribute here. And participate every week. There is no such thing as an image that's not worthy of presenting. An image from recent days or from as many years ago as you want. It's really a lot of fun, despite the shortcomings we've discussed. We're always looking for new members. The benefit of participation far out-weighs the problems. The best weeks are those where lively discussion is triggered by one or multiple images. The only important rule here is civility. The only things that are important are images. No egos. No agendas. Any given week is totally unpredictable. "It's like a box of chocolates." One never knows what's in the wrapper!

Rich

OK, I'm late to the party. The discussion with Rich make me post a recent image of one of my grandchildren during a walk downtown. The one thing done today is converting the image to sRGB as i don't trust all phones, pads and computers out there to be color managed. (Rec. 2020 Rich?) looking at the triptych today make me think I need to fix it and add some white space both between images as well as around them all. Let me know what you think!