Hello there.
A warm welcome to Thursday's thread.
How's the weather out there.  We are finally going to get some warm temps, actually hot temps (80's) on Saturday and Sunday.  My magnolia tree should be in full bloom by then.

The special assignment for tonight's camera club meeting was Wine Glasses.  I did a light painting for that.  Here is the final version after selecting 8 photos from the shoot and layering them using selected parts from each. Including these specific areas:

• The wine glass
  
• The area of the scarf on the right and center
  
• The fringe of the scarf on the bottom
  
• The area of the scar on the left
  
• The background
  
• The label on the wine bottle
  
• The right side of the bottle
  
• The left side of the bottle
  

Attached Files

Thumbnail(s)
   

Good day all.

A little scene in the front yard, taken yesterday and processed a few minutes ago...

   

Greetings All!
I hope your week is off to a good start!

Sunday Downtown Azaleas

Morning Everbody,
Have not had much luck lately posting and getting some sort of response. Probably because it is that I post at the end of the day.

Anyway here is a studio shot of three sisters. The challenge was to have each one equal emphasis as well as all three a cohesive unit..
Hope you enjoy. Photography for pay is somewhat different than making images for your own enjoyment....

Three Sisters;
   

Nieces wedding;
   

A quiet Meal

https://www.leicaphotog.com/

Here is another shot of the Great Egret that ambled around my neighborhood a few days ago. (He is standing in my front yard; the grayish background is my next-door neighbor's driveway.)

   

Adults in the breeding season display a color change in and around the eye; changing from the usual yellow to a rather vivid, minty-color with just a touch of yellow green.

With this egret, the color is less mint-colored and more yellow-green than with most others. I wondered why and came up with two plausible reasons:

1) As I noted in my original egret thread, this egret may be an adolescent and not yet able to attain the fully adult green eye patch coloring.

2) Or it could be simply how far along in the breeding season this egret is - maybe it was before or after the peak, so the eye area color change might not have reached its peak, or had already peaked and is gradually disappearing.

Perhaps it's a combination of the two.

TGIF everybody.

I still have a few more shots to process of the egret that walked around our neighborhood a few days ago.

But for today I'll show something with strong color...

   

Have yourselves a great weekend.

My neighborhood was designed (back in the late 50s or early 60s) as a square approximately one mile on all sides. Small houses, small yards, no open grassland or open water (other than the occasional swimming pool).



So I was surprised when on a late morning walk to see a Great Egret flying very low - only a couple of feet above the ground/street/sidewalk. Then it landed and started exploring the front yards. I had never seen this behavior before in a Great Egret. The bird was about 3/4 normal adult size, so I assumed it was just a confused adolescent that hadn't learned where to find food, and what places to avoid. All thoughts of my planned trip to the store disappeared as I followed him around the neighborhood, taking many photos.



1) Here he (I'm assuming it's a male, but it's impossible to be sure) is doing a fine impersonation of a plastic lawn figurine...



    2)



Just below someone's window, still investigating among the plants...



   



3) What could he possibly be looking for on this driveway?



   



He kept going from yard to yard seeking something. Very perplexing. After about 15 minutes I resumed my trip to the store. Walking back home about 20 minutes later I saw the same bird further down the block, still searching in yards.



4) Now on my street, 4 or 5 houses down from mine. This certainly looks like their typical hunting behavior - staring intently at something and very slowly and silently moving closer. But I couldn't figure out what he was hunting.



   



5) Aha! Here he is with the prey - one of the many fence lizards in the area - I should have guessed that. And I saw him catch a second lizard, but missed the shot, Apparently he wasn't a confused young bird after all. Just hunting in an atypical area; perhaps forced to try this to avoid competition from older and more experienced birds in the preferred hunting areas of open grassland and particularly wetlands.



   



He eventually reached my yard, and I got some good close-ups. My errand to the store turned into quite a remarkable experience.

Sorry about all the extra gaps - the system keeps adding them back in as if I want everything presented in double space.

Just a couple more with the Digital CL from yesterday.

Morning Folks.

I quite often use a programme called Dynamic Auto Painter (DAP) by Oscar of MediaChance. This attempts to turn photographs into digital paintings using artistic brush strokes, etc. In fact, DAP is based on another of his programmes called Photo Reactor, which is quite fun to play with. I recall that I also posted something I did using his RoboBrush inside Photoshop back in our WC days.

Oscar recently came up with a new programme called “AI Photo and Art Enhancer” (AIPAE), which can be used to up-size images (amongst other things). I don’t often need anything special to up-size images. Generally, my smallest raw files are 6 MPx, although most are 24 MPx, and Photoshop normally does a reasonable job of increasing the size of the smaller ones.

See https://www.mmbforums.com/viewtopic.php?t=7796&start=10 for more on AIPAE.

Anyway, yesterday I was trying to up-res an old jpg file taken back in 2001 with a 4 MPx point and shoot Sony digital. Normal Photoshop methods were not working well. So, I downloaded demo copies of both Topaz Gigapixel and AIPAE to see what they could do. Being a Topaz fan, I was surprised how well AIPAE worked! For this particular image, it was the winner.

Noteworthy Comments:

For AIPAE it is first necessary to address the noise situation. (In those days digital images were extremely noisy.) If this isn't done, AIPAE just multiplies the size of the noise, which ruins the output. On the other hand, Gigapixel does address noise during its process, and I found it best not to do an initial DeNoise.

I normally export my images from Lightroom and edit them in Photoshop as TIFF files in the 16-bit ProPhoto RGB colour space. It appears that AIPAE assumes that images are in 8-bit sRGB colour space, and the up-sized images are reported as having no imbedded colour space tag. This wasn't a major problem with the particular image I was working on. But, in future, I will ensure that I export 8-bit files in sRGB for re-sizing in AIPAE (as I always do with DAP in any case).

So, if you need to up-size images, I suggest you give AIPAE a try.
 
regards - Peter

P.S. I see that Oscar mentions getting rid of noise as being one of the attributes of AIPAE. Perhaps I should learn more about it before I comment !