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I am putting together a directory for my church, and I’m having a little trouble with my white background. After extensive editing, the white wall looks either like a checkerboard, or a water ripple. I shoot in RAW, and edit in Lightroom. After I convert to jpeg, the background problems get much worse. I’m just trying to print glossy 4×6 photos with the most clarity possible. Can I print from RAW, when it looks better? Viewing the photos in windows photo viewer looks much worse than it does in lightroom. I’m not sure what a printout would look like. My hunch is that this has something to do with too much sharpening in lightroom. I have attached a few problem photos. And the funny thing is, these things look great as a RAW photo. Thanks!
- This topic was modified 54 years, 9 months ago by .
Doesn’t look like the attachments came through…
Are you saying that the white background looks bad even in Lightroom, or only after exporting? I’m guessing the problem is that your background isn’t “true” white. Take a look at your histogram in Lightroom, that should show the truth of the matter. An easy way to test that is to move your “Whites” slider in Lightroom to the right until your background is completely blown out, even if it makes the picture look funny. Now export it and see if you’re still seeing the “ripples”. I’ve done very little with pure white backgrounds, but the I did do a few product shots of a lens, and to get the background to be “pure white” I took an adjustment brush and pushed the “Exposure” slider option all the way to the right, then painted around all over the background that was supposed to be white. While you’re in “Adjustment Brush” mode, you can hit the “O” key to show a red overlay which will show where all you’ve painted. That makes it easy to visualize some spots you’ve missed. If your photos are all basically the same, you can copy the brush across with the “Sync” tool so you don’t have to do it for each individual picture.
The “ripple” effect is greatly worsened by compression. The more a jpg file is compressed, the more visible the artifacts will become. If you would export as a lossles
.tifit would probably decrease the problem. However,.tiffiles can easily be 5-6 times larger than.jpg, so unless you really need lossless, you’re better off with.jpgto save on hard drive space.Well, I’m trying to print them @ shutterfly or sam’s club or something. So, would their printers recognize a .tif? I also noticed that when I exported a smaller jpeg, the ripples almost disappeared. If I’m just trying to print few hundred 4×6″s what would be me best option?
Here are the attachments if they will come through… Windows Photo Viewer shows the waves best.
Attachments:
Wow, you’ve really got me stumped! When I first saw it, I wondered if it was some sort of moire, or something like that. The best example of it that I could find is here. The second image you posted looks somewhat similar to that pattern.
I guess my next question is, what was your “white” background made out of? Was it a painted wall, or a whiteboard, or some sort of material?
I did quite a bit of searching online, but found very little that dealt with the issue. I did find a few examples that look very similar to yours, but no one had an answer as to what caused it, or how to fix it. Here are two pictures on flickr that exhibit the same phenomenon, but they were both taken by the same person with an older Canon DSLR. That proves that it’s not just an isolated issue with your camera in particular, or Nikon DSLRs in general.
I’m guessing that as you said, it might have to do with sharpening in Lightroom, and someone else evidently had a similar opinion.
I also found a thread on Adobe forums where someone had a somewhat similar issue, but again, there wasn’t really any answer. And here’s one more example involving Photoshop as well.
One common theme seems to be that Lightroom is always involved…
Anyway, I would try a few things to see if you can clear up your trouble. First, try exporting to a
.tiffile, and see if you get the same issue.Definitely try turning off all sharpening in Lightroom and export, then add some noise reduction and export, and so on, see if you can make it disappear. Try ‘masking’ the sharpening and see if it makes any difference. In fact, you could even try Lightroom’s built in moire tool. Make sure that you don’t have Lightroom set to resize/resample on export, and make sure that it also isn’t sharpening on export.
Let me know how it turns out, I hope it’s not too difficult to fix!
OK, the background is not really white, it’s a painted wall, and it’s actually slightly purple. This morning, I tried exporting in jpeg and tiff and ironically they both worked fine! I tried full sharpening, and none to the same effect. The only difference is you kept mentioning sharpening, so I turned off the “sharpen for- glossy paper- standard” option in the export box. That appears to have been the problem. I reckon it can’t handle the double sharpening from the manual sharpening I did, plus the auto sharpening from the export box. Thanks a lot for taking the time to help, and I’ll have to watch out for “auto adjustments” in the future!
Well, I’m glad it turned out OK! It’s always nice when it’s a simple fix, even if it wasn’t necessarily an obvious one. I haven’t done much experimenting with output sharpening, so it’s good to know that it can cause unforeseen complications!
Hey would y’all recommend a screenshot program that is really safe to use? (I’m really wary of viruses and info gathering!) I’m looking to be able to show a friend through a few things on his computer. Thanks!
Good question! Just FYI, you don’t need a “program” if all you want to do is a full screen shot. Just hit the “Prnt Scrn” button on you keyboard, which will copy your screen to the clipboard. Then you can paste it into GIMP, or Microsoft Paint to save it as a jpg file.
However, if you want to “upgrade” your screenshots a bit, you will want a program designed specifically for screenshots. I searched for quite a while before I found one that I like. It’s called Shotty, and you can find it here. The main reason I prefer it above most screenshot software, is that it can preserve the rounded corners/transparency of windows on Windows 7/Vista. It also allows you to set your own key combination for capturing the screenshot, and you can also configure it so save the screenshots automatically to a folder!
Hope that answers your question!
P.S. If you ever suspect something that you’re about to download from the internet, go to http://www.virustotal.com and scan it. It will scan the file/link with about 40 different antivirus software, so if it doesn’t find anything, you’re probably ok! The best way to avoid getting virus’s is to pay attention to the website you’re downloading it from. Take Skype for example. If you want to download skype, ALWAYS go to http://www.skype.com to get it. Don’t search google for it, then click on the first link you see, which could be
www.downloads123.skype.comand is more likely than not infected with some sort of spyware, or worse. If in doubt, scan it with virustotal, or ask someone who knows more about it.Glad to see you go the moire problem solved!
For screenshots, I use the Chrome extension NimbusScreenshot
Good to know about VirusTotal.com, @buddingphotographer!
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