Scooter maiden voyage

[Frank O'Donnell]

Had 'way too much fun taking a newly eBay-acquired Apollo/Dacor scooter to Catalina Island for its maiden voyage this morning. Copious thanks to fellow owners Jersey Jim and to Jon for consultation in getting it running and configured.

I can't quite drive, equalize and take pictures at the same time (at least not yet), but I could do two out of three -- scooter and equalize, stop, get out camera, take picture, resume scootering, etc.

The vehicle allowed me to take a number of marine creatures by surprise, including this juvenile ray.

Can't wait to recharge and get in the water again!

 

[Adrian]

large file size

Hi Frank,
Just a tecnical point. I've noticed that your pictures are very large in terms of file size. For example your latest of the ray is around 350 k or so. My trick is to first tweak the picture for contrast, brigtness, color correction if needed, etc, then resize it to the dimensions I want and only then save it as a jpg at 75% quality. You'll find that the size reduces to around 36 K with no loss of quality to the image. You'll save a lot of space in your computer as well.

For making a master copy I usally save the image in large resolution and at 100% quality after tweaking and before resizing if it's an image I like. Then I save the smaller copy with a different name. Photoshop and Photoimpact have good jpg saving.

That water seems so clear!

Adrian

 

[Kars]

Nice photo Frank, really sharp, colourful and crispy!

Thanks for sharing!

Kars.

 

[Frank O'Donnell]

Re: large file size

Originally posted by Adrian
My trick is to first tweak the picture for contrast, brigtness, color correction if needed, etc, then resize it to the dimensions I want and only then save it as a jpg at 75% quality. You'll find that the size reduces to around 36 K with no loss of quality to the image.

Hi Adrian, thanks for the comment. Actually I've often noticed significant degradation on many pictures when I've tried saving them at lower jpeg quality levels. For example, I tried that (in Photoshop) on this picture:

http://www.inkbox.net/stjohn/featherduster.jpg

to get it down under 100K to post on another board that has a hard size limit. The colors just went to mush, so I just gave up and never posted it.

Since I have a reasonably fast Internet connection and ample hard drives, I don't think of a 300-400K file as being particularly big. (At work we deal with 50MB TIFF files -- now those are big! ;-) ) But I realize everyone else out there may not be in the situation, so I'll give this another go the next time I have something to post.

 

[Adrian]

Frank,
Here's your featherduster at 75% jpeg compression, it's only 53K and for practical purposes the same visually. I used Ulead PhotoImpact as it has a nice system where you can see in real time the differences at different compressions while comparing it to the original. Photoshop at 60 percent was giving me 80K but it looked good, no mushy colors.

You are right in that most people probably have 56K connections.

Adrian

 

[Frank O'Donnell]

Adrian, hmm, well that's interesting -- I'd certainly agree that the version of the featherduster you posted is very close in color to the larger version. Also, I just opened the larger version in Photoshop and tried recompressing it to ~90K, and the results were very acceptable. So I frankly don't know what the issue is when I tried it before, but I do clearly remember getting a very muddy-looking result at one point using medium jpeg compression.

So I'll tell you what -- next time I have a picture to post I'll try shooting for at least < 100K, if not more compressed than that. If I get what I consider noticeably degraded results, I'll send you the different versions.

Frank

 

[DeepThought]

Great picture. Even our air is not as clear as your water...:hmm

 

[Frank O'Donnell]

Originally posted by DeepThought
Even our air is not as clear as your water...:hmm

Well, before you get the wrong idea, vis was not that stellar on this dive (it's plankton bloom time for us, very milky water). I found, though, that it cleared up in very shallow water (~8-ft) between the kelp and the shore, where I found the little ray above.

Then again, we also have days like this -- the best picture from my last freedive session in late April at a local jetty:

 

[Pablo]

Have you try the "save for web" function on photoshop... what you think about the results?

 

[Frank O'Donnell]

Originally posted by Frank O'Donnell
Then again, we also have days like this -- the best picture from my last freedive session in late April at a local jetty:

Having a little trouble with the attachment, but this is the picture I intended to show here (that's a sheepcrab in there somewhere):