Old Noisy Panos

Posted by Philip in Old Photo Critique, Photo Processing

Lets turn the way-back machine to March 19th 2000.  Almost 10 years ago.  I wanted to see what sort of photos I had from my trip to Switzerland and I ran across this set of 4 photos looking out over Lake Zurich.  This set has everything going against it.

1. I used a 1.3 MP point and shoot camera.
2. No RAW capture.  (Was RAW available then?)
3. I shot this hand-held.
4. It was early evening.
5. I took this after being awake for 37 hours with the last 13 hours on a plane.

So quickly stitching this together you get a very boring and noisy photo.  (I’m leaving the salvage in on purpose so you can easily see the stitch points.)

Not much to look at but it has some potential.  In most landscape photos you want the foreground and the background to be relatively equal in level.  But when I try to balance out the foreground I came up with this:

There’s nothing in the foreground detail that screams “look at me.”  The foreground is where the bulk of the noise come into play.  So it’s probably best to leave the foreground as silhouette and play up be moodiness of the sky and landscape.  So when I do this sort of adjustment in Photoshop the first thing I do is to turn the JPG into a smart object.  That way I retain all of the original detail no matter how many filters I apply.  So my 2 minute adjustment consisted of changing the levels and boosting the saturation of the blues.

Aside from the change in exposure on the right-hand side this turned out to be a fairly reasonable image.  It’s not high enough quality to put in a gallery unless I make it a bit more surreal.

I’m not often fond of this look, but in this case it uses the noise in the image to it’s advantage.  Either way, I’d opt to have the third image on my wall even it it was a smaller sized photo.