Man Made Marsh, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, Soccoro co., New Mexico. N-90, 28-70

-- Billy Gorum (Herphoto@aol.com), May 22, 2000

Answers

Enjoyable subdued sort of a landscape. Love the colours. The swirl of foreground vegetation is the key feature that makes this one work very well for me.

-- Garry Schaefer (schaefer@pangea.ca), May 22, 2000.

Sshh -- don't say "hand of man," or Chris Rustage will start yelling that you broke the rules! He's a real stickler, you know. :)

I like the textures and the "swirl" of vegetation, to steal a good phrase. I don't like the JPEG artifacts visible around the edges of the grass and the mountains, but that's the fault of the low quality JPG compression and not the photo.

-- Christian Deichert (torgophile@aol.com), May 22, 2000.

that is a truly outstanding composition. well done.

-- wayne harrison (wayno@netmcr.com), May 22, 2000.

Is that a car I can see in the background ?

-- Chris Rustage (chris@amateur.co.uk), May 24, 2000.

Christian,

I'm pretty new to all this digital stuff. Is there anyin do to get rid of the jpeg effects. I've got some other images where this is even more of a problem than it is here.

Chris,

There is no car in this picture, but then I think you knew that already.

-- Billy Gorum (Herphoto@aol.com), May 24, 2000.

Those artifacts, or "sprites," are a result of data lost in JPEG compression by repeatedly saving a JPEG file and/or saving at high compression or low quality (same thing). You can avoid them by making all the changes you need to make before saving a file as whatever.jpg; alternatively, save the file as a TIFF image first, as a backup, make your changes, then save the final product as whatever.jpg. Also, set your software to use higher quality JPEG's by default; in Photoshop, I use either a "6" or "7" setting.

While I'm giving out free scanning advice, always try to scan using settings so that the scanned image is the size you want. For prints, it's usually around 72dpi or 100dpi; for 35mm slides, I like scanning around 400dpi -- if I recall correctly, thast setting gives me images right around 500x333. Digitally resizing images usually results in a loss of sharpness that unsharp mask or similar sharpening tools can only partially restore.

Unfortunately, it's too late for this image; to my knowledge, the data lost in JPEG compression isn't recoverable. (Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.) You'll have to rescan.

-- Christian Deichert (torgophile@aol.com), May 24, 2000.