Rose

[ELAY]

My apologies for the window screen reference -- I was trying to put into words what I was seeing on the photo.

1. Noise. JC gave you the short version -- get ready for the long. Here is a blow up of a petal section from the photo you posted. You will see that there are all kinds little squares in black, white, intermediate pink shades, etc. which are interfering with the presentation of a smooth pink petal, which is what I think you sought out to capture.



(I hope you can see despite your bad eyes. At home, though, just look at your file on really high magnification -- 200 or 400%.)

Now compare to the version I did noise reduction on (it isn't exactly the same shot, but it's close -- line up the water drops). Much more unbroken pink, much less random black/white/coloured boxes.



I don't have a pink flower to compare with, but compare to this crop from a piece of a much larger yellow shot that I took -- again, more unbroken colour.



This isn't intended as some kind of quality comparison -- that would be a rigged comparison because the yellow is a crop from a large file, while the crops of your pics are from small files. But I hope it helps you understand what I mean by noise.

2. Noise reduction Noise reduction software is programmed to identify and get rid of noise (I expect it has something to do with sampling various parts of the image and then writing over the noisy pixels). It does not sharpen, in fact, because noise reduction relies on blurring and smoothing, it can make the pic softer. To my eyes though, your photo is extremely noisy, which is the first problem to fix; you can always sharpen after.

EL

(PS -- Bandwidth patrol, I had small pics originally, but resized them when I saw the reference to bad eyesight.)

(PPS -- I just caught myself thinking that my random crop of those yellow petals makes a nice photo -- clearly time for bed.)

[WriterBarb]

Thanks to both of you I think I get what noise is. I'll play with my editing program to see if I can learn to eliminate noise and sharpen my pictures.

Thanks again.