Seriously, this is NOT a shopped pix.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

[Svartalf]

It's shopped. Believe me. Look at the pixels. I've seen a few shopped pix in my time...

Given the image quality, I thought it was a CG thing... quality is very good, but it sure looks like no photography I've ever seen, even if it's graphics superimposed on one.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

It's shopped. Believe me. Look at the pixels. I've seen a few shopped pix in my time...

Given the image quality, I thought it was a CG thing... quality is very good, but it sure looks like no photography I've ever seen, even if it's graphics superimposed on one.

I've seen skies like that a few times, mostly at sea. I had the captain of USS Reeves wake me up (via messenger) to get topside and take pix once. Two fronts about to collide, like huge ships on a collision course.

[Mr P]

http://www.cracked.com/article_16556_15 ... opped.html

[MiM]

Would kill for a wallpaper size copy, 1980xwhatever.

But that would brake the (meagre) illusion of the picture not being shopped

[tattuchu]

Lenticular clouds over Colorado

Shopped

[tattuchu]

This is a pic I took one afternoon in August 2010.
Not as high resolution as zillas, and very monochrome so not as colorful either.

I didn't get the best of it as I was walking home at the time and didn't have my camera on me. I hurried back to the house to catch what I could before it was over.



It snaked across the sky and I had to get it in separate shots that don't quite give the effect being there had.

I wanna fuck those clouds

[Svartalf]

Remember what happend to Ixion?

[HomerJay]

It looks like HDR rather than 'shopping.

[klr]

http://www.cracked.com/article_16556_15 ... opped.html

The "tennis match" on top of the Burj-Al-Arab: check

Not shopped, as far as we know. But there are more ways of deceiving people than using Photoshop. "Tennis match" me arse.

[Horwood Beer-Master]

Would kill for a wallpaper size copy, 1980xwhatever.

Biggest version I could find (only 1000 × 667)

[FBM]

Would kill for a wallpaper size copy, 1980xwhatever.

Biggest version I could find (only 1000 × 667)

shoopdawoop.png (243.42 KiB) Viewed 685 times

But no less awesome, because the shooped version is probably closer to what you would've really seen had you been there.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

At sea we saw similar things. The ship would be in semi-darkness, but the clouds, being a few miles higher, still got sunlight. I wish my pix of those days had survived.

[Delvo]

I believe the trick that was used on that image is what they call "HDR", which means "high dynamic range". Dynamic range is the difference between the brightest and darkest parts of the scene. Scenes with a wide dynamic range are especially hard to take a picture of, because you tend to either get plenty of detail in the dark areas but just blown-out white for the brighter areas, or plenty of detail in the bright areas but just a black shadow of an abyss in the darker areas. HDR, as a photographic technique, refers to a particular method of dealing with that challenge. It essentially consists of taking multiple shots of the same scene with different settings with little to no pause between them so things don't move, then combining them into one. In the extreme two-image case I just outlined above, just imagine taking the perfectly detailed bright part from one picture and the perfectly detailed dark part from the other one, and just dropping the parts that are too bright or too dark in each... although HDR as applied in reality uses 3-5 images instead of 2, and uses whichever zone on the scale up from total black to total white each one captured best.

It's become pretty popular lately for scenes with natural bright and dark regions like this one, but there is a catch with it. There's only so much actual difference between the brightest and darkest colors your computer screen or a printed piece of photograph paper can display, and the way you maintain visible clarity is by filling in the range between them. For a bright image or area of an image, that means making some features in it darker; for a dark image or area of an image, it means making some features in it brighter. So the result is just a way of bringing the extremes closer together, making an image that doesn't look the way the real thing looked because parts of the bright areas are darkened and parts of the dark areas are brightened.

[Robert_S]

So, does HDR enhancement qualify as "shooped" or should we just say it's been "post processed"?