Nice shots there I went sunday too first time aswel shame those aircraft did not stay hopefully the 2012 one they will though I hope to see it next year, What do you mean by this :confused:
ATB
James
Hi James,
The BBMF aircraft are always flown very cautiously, from several people i have spoken to who fly Spits and Hurricanes (or have done in the past) have said that the BBMF have a load limit on the airframes they cant pull more then a certain amount of stress on the airframe through orders from the C/O.
If you watch thier displays its always very calm and timid, almost graceful but the aircraft are not normally put through what they were designed for, there is (in my opinion) a lack of energy in the displays. Compare that to Nigel Lamb in 434 or Dan Griffiths in Ta805 and you will see how they put the machine through its paces and show what a great machine the Spitfire is.
They are just too worried about the airframes in my opinion.
ACR 6.0 that comes as part of CS5 is rubbish! They’ve completely screwed up the sharpening which is really annoying as I’ve been sharpening happily in RAW since CS2 and I have no idea why they’ve changed something that worked so well. The settings I mentioned work great in CS4 (ACR 5.6) but as you say, won’t work in CS5. I deleted the trial of CS5 and went back to using CS4, so unfortunately I can’t help with settings in CS5.
I have to say though, in my experience the settings you’re using do seem very aggressive. The way digital photography works makes it an inherently soft medium; a very basic explanation of how sharpening works is that it darkens one side of a line of contrast and lightens the other (so images with poor contrast also often look much softer). The Radius control is sharpening software adjusts how wide the area that’s affected is, and if you make it too large then it will in fact do the exact opposite of what you want to achieve by making defining edges wider and thus actually blurring the image rather than sharpening it. As a general rule I use a radius no larger than 0.6 for full size images and no larger than 0.3 for images between 1024 and 1600 pixels wide, although of course that’s in either Photoshop itself or previous versions of ACR, not CS5.
You may actually find that you achieve better results by sharpening the JPEG image rather than RAW. I know the immediate reaction from most RAW shooters when this is suggested is an immediate and emphatic no, but it’s important to note that the idea RAW editing is lossless is actually something of a myth. The higher bit rate means you’re shifting more data around when you edit so you’re less likely to run into compression problems (8 bit splits each channel into 256 levels of brightness whereas 12 bit splits each into 4096 levels), but such problems only really occur on JPEG images when extreme adjustments are being made (like massive mid-tone correction using Curves which often visibly compresses the highlights). There’s absolutely no technical reason why you shouldn’t get the same quality from a well exposed JPEG as you would from a RAW file, bearing in mind that if editing for the internet you ultimately end up with an 8 bit JPEG anyway. So, as ACR 6.0 is kinda screwed up perhaps you could try doing things like white balance correction, adding saturation and adjusting brightness/contrast in RAW and then sharpening/cropping in JPEG.
Just an idea anyway. 🙂
Paul
Excellent thoughts Paul, I will re-edit some of the ones i have posted here and see what the results are like, I must admit that the 2nd round of editting i do does do alot, I will have a play and drop ya an update with what I find.
I like alot of the CS5 features aside from the ACR sharperning, like the clipping and content aware features so i think i would find it hard to dump CS5 but i will have a tinker 🙂
all the best all
Pete
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