Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Fakarava-ponton-rotoava.jpg

Fakarava, French Polynesia[edit]

Fakarava inner lagoon taken from a pontoon near the village of Rotoava (Tuamotus, French Polynesia)
Picture credit: Frédéric Jacquot, 2005.

Nominate and Support. I'm not Frédéric Jacquot, by the way. --Hottentot 23:21, 19 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
The image is now included in Tuamotus. Support. Physchim62 (talk) 08:30, 20 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Comment - The image is extremely noisy at full size. I resampled it and tried to smooth out the noise in the sky as much as possible. I also adjusted the tone of the sky very slightly. I will support either version, however. I think it's just that beautiful.PiccoloNamek 05:57, 21 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Comment - I concur. I think the picture is good enough that the noise doesn't really matter. Besides, the photo won't be at full resolution. --vaeiou 22:32, 22 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
~~Support the 2nd version~~. Both are beautiful, but the edit just has a little more sharpness, especially on the wooden pier. Raven4x4x 00:30, 23 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
- Now that the 2nd version has been removed, I will support the original. Raven4x4x 08:21, 25 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Support Orignal. Strong Oppose changed version. The updated version is way oversharpened and exibits halos at the size given by the image page. --Gmaxwell 04:43, 23 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Comment - He's right, I think I really overdid it there. I'll try to fix that later.PiccoloNamek 05:14, 23 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
- Perhaps I'm revealing my total inexperience and lack of knowledge here, but I am unable to find anything wrong with Piccolo's edit. Not that it really matters, I like both versions a lot, but I'd just like to know what is so wrong with this image that I can't see. Raven4x4x 13:17, 23 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  - In the thumbnails they look pretty much alike, however if you look at the two images at full screen size you'll see some artifacts from image processing. The process of 'shapening' in an image editor does not actually add resolution to an image: what it does is increase accutance. I started to write a lot about accutance because I think you need to understand sharpening to understand the cause of the artifacts... I wrote so much that I turned into a lame (but illustrated) stub articl, so go there. In any case, if you look at the trunk on the left it has light and dark halos (light are usually more annoying), the noise in the sky is greatly increased (look around the darker cloud to the upper left of the shelter), and the water looks outright abrasive rather than smooth (perhaps that one is a matter of taste, but its less accurate!). Again, this is mostly visable on the image at a large size, at thumbnail size there is less of an impact because the downsampling smoothes out the effect of the sharpening. However, there is still some quality reduction in the thumbnails: if you look carefully in the Y of the trunk in PiccoloNamek's image you'll see there is some grittyness there. This is not due to the sharpening directly, but due to the sharpened image being more difficult for jpeg to compress when the thumbnail is created. The positive effects you see from the processing exist because even though the thumbnailing mostly destroys the sharpening, the image was so vastly oversharpened that some remains. I have created an additional feature for mediawiki which allows you to request some post-thumbnailing sharpening as an image tag setting, but we already have problems handling the number of thumbnails created already (we have about 10 copies of every image, sharp settings would probably make that 20) and the process would add an additional performance burden, so I probably won't request this feature become part of the official code any time soon. --Gmaxwell 18:15, 23 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Original verion ok. "Improved" version: WTF was this guy thinking? Keep him away from image editors! Kim Bruning 00:50, 24 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
- Kim, take a look through the archives and you'll see dozens of photos that Piccolo has improved wonderfully, and this is certainly the first time I've heard any real complaints about his work. I'll take your word for it that this one isn't that great (thanks for the big explanation Gmaxwell) even though I don't share your dislike for it, and I'll be interested to see if Piccolo can come up with a better version. Raven4x4x 03:56, 24 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  - I actually went through the archives with Gmaxwell, and a third party who shall remain anonymous at this point in time. I do think Piccolo is a great photographer, and let's leave it at that. :-) Kim Bruning 06:54, 24 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Ouch, that's like getting complimented but then kicked in the crotch right afterwards. Oh well, I suppose all I can hope to do is to keep improving. I know I'm a lot better now than I was a year ago. Perhaps one year from now I will be what you consider to be acceptable.PiccoloNamek 07:01, 24 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

( + ) Support By a narrow squeak. Noise ruins it, but it is such a beautiful part of the world and the photo is pretty good, so I think its worthy. --Fir0002 08:12, 27 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Since the original 2nd version has been removed, may I suggest a new 3rd version: I only removed the noise from the most objectionable parts of the sky with some soft masking, but did not use any sharpening at all. Some downsampling (to 1600 px) took care of that. If 1600 px is wide enough, I think my experiment may have impoved the image. BTW, re. acutance, there's a great digiphoto tutorial here, see the "understanding sharpness" chapter. --Janke | Talk 13:19, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
- At my screen resolution I honestly cannot tell the difference between these two images, although I am only at 1024×768 (that's probably why I thought the 2nd version was alright). So I'll be happy with whichever one. Raven4x4x 05:47, 29 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Weak support. --Lysy ^(talk) 19:39, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Promoted Image:Fakarava-ponton-rotoava.jpg. All this discussion about image editing and it turns out that everyone was happy with the original... Raven4x4x 05:39, 3 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]