Pincushions & DETAIL

Congratulations! This is the Image of the Week selection for the Flora and Macro Gallery, week ending 24th August, 2012!Stack of 42

For some reason my images look soft when I compress them to such a small size. If anyone has any advice about that please let me know!

This is at 650....at 720 it was too large & got rejected! I included a detail of the image below (which is also showing softening!).

For one thing this is too small. It is 650 on the long side and you can go to 800.

Beautiful cactus flowers and a lovely composition! I think it could use just a touch more contrast and possibly a bit more sharpening (not much). I agree that a larger size would much better for a critique. A terrific image!

It might have been rejected for file size. It must be under 250k and no larger than 800 px on the long side.

Lovely shot. The flowers and composition are really beautiful. Thanks for sharing.

It's a beautiful image - lovely grouping of blooms and composition.
The full image does look soft, but I can see the missing detail in the crop.

There are two issues, softness and size.
On the softness issue, do you sharpen and then resize for posting? If you do, try resizing first then sharpening.
On the size issue, sharpening images with a lot of fine detail can make the file size huge - here it's the spines.
- try a selective sharpening. Select just the flowers using the marquee tool and an irregular area, sharpen them the usual amount. Then invert the selection sharpen the rest of the image with a smaller radius - less sharpening. That alone might do it. If not:
- When you save as JPG, use a smaller quality number. If you save at 10, try 9.
- If that doesn't do it, try a smaller pixel dimension.

very pretty compo , u are the master of the stacking , well done !

Hi

A beautiful shot of combination of shots of this little grouping – I think it works very nicely indeed. Regarding the sharpness issue – I think Tom’s hit the nail on the head in regards to applying usm after the image has been resized to the required presentation size

All the best
Matthew

Thanks for the suggestions! I will try it out & see if it helps. The lower quality numbers seem to look pretty bad too, but I will try that as well!

Super composition. Follow Tom's advise on sharpening.

After resizing down to 72 dpi and 800 pixels I apply USM at 125, 0.2, 0 three times and then save for the web and it this has worked for years when posting

Some good sharpening advice. It's a lovely image Eirini.

Very lovely! you got the Word, I thing, on sizing and sharpening. Good reminder for us all.

Wonderful image Eirini!, big congrats on IOW, well deserved!