How much more can this be sharpened

[jjohns5182]

Railpics rejected it twice for "unsharpened" after I worked to sharpen it over the old image. So I'm wondering how far do I have to go? I'm afraid I'll ruin it if I sharpen it anymore.

[JCagle]

In the current state I don't think it could be sharpened much without blowing the sharpness all out of proportion. Do you have a copy of the original before any modifications were done?

Workflow order can have a great deal to do with how far a picture can be sharpened before it becomes blown out. A typical workflow should go something like straighten and then crop, then sharpen before resizing. The reason you want to sharpen before resizing is you are sharpening the bigger file before cutting it down. I typically do it in the largest size that will fit in my window. When you resize the image it also serves as a sort of sharpening because you are taking x number of pixels and then putting them in a smaller area. This compression of area makes things a little sharper and you can tweak the sharpness with little changes instead of big ones.

The smallest change I could make to get it sharper without totally blowing it out was 85% contrast with an edge width of 1 pixel and noise reduction at 1. It makes the loco really sharp but the trees are a little over sharp.

Just a couple more notes on things they might knock it for since they are famous for giving one reason and then once that is fixed they throw up another.

I would try to level out the engine. They like things to be nice and straight and level even if they aren't in real life unless it is evident that the train is on a super-elevated curve or something of that nature.

They tend to like color shots unless it is a decision made for artistic purposes. I believe the reason behind it is color images get more clicks because they catch the eye more, and they are in the click business.

They may find the light just off the rear end of the loco to be a distraction especially since it casts a glare on the side.

All in all I think you have something workable here, and even if they don't like it it doesn't mean it's a bad photo. There are tons of pictures that get published every month that would not be accepted on that site for one reason or another.

[jjohns5182]

That did start out as a color image . They rejected it for over saturation and I got frustrated trying to edit it because nothing I did to fix the saturation seemed to be good. So I converted it to B&W.

Oh by the way I have got my first accepted submission earlier this week and it was this one http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=338658 which I was surprised they accepted. But I made that one B&W solely because the sky was blown out.

[E.M. Bell]

TO my eye, its not as much over saturated as just to yellow. Depending on what editing program you are using, you can de-sat certain colors a bit. I would bring the yellow levels down a bunch, and maybe add a tad of red. Looks like the only lighting you had there was sodium vapor lights, and those are just bad for night photography. They mess up natural colors bad, and it can be hard to fix. 


The B&W version is just WAY to over sharpened. You can see the noise and pixalation in it several places. I would suggest using a unsharp mask instead of a sharpening tool, then reduce the noise. There is a neat little program out on the net called neatimage, that will is awesome for fixing up night shots. It will gt rid of the noise, sharpen and generaly repair what ever you need. There is a free version of it out there that works great, just google it..

[jjohns5182]

Exactly E.M. that's what I thought about the B&W version and that's why I didn't get why they called that photo too soft. It dose look too sharp to me to. I'll work with the suggestions I use PSE which is a free downgraded version of photoshope. It does have the unsharp mask.

[Michael Knight]

Since Turd is a nice guy sometimes, here's a edited version. The first thing that was done was to level the image. Enjoy!

[JCagle]

Ah yes, Typing late at night made me forget the unsharpen mask tool that I used to no avail. Those sodium vapor lights are a pain. The Canon program I use to edit my raw pictures has different lighting modes that you can select to pull some of the yellow out from those lights that is done for cameras shooting in raw. For all other cameras shooting jpgs and post raw edits you can use a click white balance and make it somewhat better.

I did a click balance on it and of course a little leveling and cropping to make it fit the new crop right and the results are below.

[jjohns5182]

Thanks Turd Furgerson and JCagle Both edits look nice if I can find a moment this week when I'm not doing college classwork I'll try to apply these edits myself to my 3000+ pixel version. Of course I couldn't post the high res version here because photobucket only allows 800x600.

Meanwhile I'm going to go about posting some of my other stuff til I get the time to make these adjustments. Blame college Aiken Tech is killing me this week lol.

[JCagle]

No problem at all. Glad to be of help. I have quite the busy week ahead of me so I understand. Let us see how it turns out!