What's this strange effect?

[nemesis256]

You mean the crop in my original post? That was a screen grab from Lightroom (got lazy). But what you're seeing there is really what I'm seeing in Lightroom. As far as the two full sized pictures, those are straight JPG exports from Lightroom. No resizing there.

[DarkNamelessOne]

Looks like camera shake to me. Did you use a tripod when taking the photos?

Edit> Might even be mirror slap if you are using a tripod.


DNO

[vandergus]

Here's an example of what I think you're seeing and which I've experienced in my own photos. I took the following photo exposing for the highlights on the rug. This is the version with the default RAW processing applied in Adobe Camera RAW (fill light = 0).


view original

Here's the version where I tried to lighten the shadows (fill light = 47)


view original

And here are %100 crops of the dogs head. You can see the same sort of grayish haloing. It also appears to only happen where the areas of shadow are bordering areas of highlight (similar to your photo) as none of the other shadow areas exhibit this artifact.



Just thought it might help clear things up.

[OsmosisStudios]

Originally Posted by DarkNamelessOne

Looks like camera shake to me. Did you use a tripod when taking the photos?

Edit> Might even be mirror slap if you are using a tripod.


DNO

Not at 1/250s shutter speeds.