Katrina Images - Advice?

[Ed Richards]

I have about 140 good 4x5 images of damage to Louisiana by hurricane Katrina. I want to pull them into a show to document the damage in a way that I think goes beyond the usual news photos. I need to figure out a better way to present them on the WWW, plus I am interested in image critiques. I have not had time to do much fine tuning in PS - this is what I got on the negative, with levels adjusted, and a couple have been sharpened. I can make them dramatic AA style images, but is the photojournalism deadpan style more appropriate to these? Should an image of destruction be pretty? Any suggestions for sponsors?

Take a look and post your comments:

biotech.law.lsu.edu/katrina/

[robc]

ed,
there is a lot of banding all over that 15MB image. Downsizing emphasizes it.

[John Flavell]

My suggestion is to use YOUR vision. These kinds of images will take a journalism idea to a documentary look...your look.

[Ed Richards]

> ed, there is a lot of banding all over that 15MB image.

Interesting - how are you viewing it? In IE, PS, and Irfanview it looks fine. I know some browsers choke on big files - I have never gotten Firefox to work with them.

I have reprocessed it to make sure there are not artifacts. Try looking at it in PS.

[tim atherton]

Someone else pointed out to me once that with this kind of project, the simplest and the hardest question to ask with your photography is:

How does this place actually look (to me)

or in this case how did it look

Of course the exciting thing is that everyone's answer is different. But the main thing is to answer that question for yourself.

[tim atherton]

That image does look much better in PS than on the web, but you do have some obvious micro banding when viewed at 100%. You also have other artifacts too - but that may be the result of the large amount of compression used in the jpeg (it's going from 93mb down to 15 mb and the compression is almost at max - which has also probably emphasised the banding).

Check an uncompressed tiff at 100%

I'm guessing it's one of the epson flatbeds it was scanned on?

[tim atherton]

btw - it also seems to have some weird or corrcupted icc profile?

did you just tag it as greyscale 2.2?

[tim atherton]

Okay I see it was the Canon 9950F. You should be able to get a decent scan from that

[robc]

I down loaded the file and opened in PS. Maybe jpeg compression is doing it. Have you opened your compressed jpeg and had a look at that?

I just re-downloaded the file and looked again and there is heavy banding. Zoom into sky at top between trees and it is very obvious. Infact I can see banding on some of the other small images. Again saving file and opening in PS.

What are you using to generate jpegs?

Anyone else see this?

[Janko Belaj]

I can't be sure, but that banding doesn't look like jpeg artifacts to me, reminds me on cheap drum scanner with ccd instead of pmt. As this one is scanned with flatbed, it might be problem of maybe too high resolution for that device? Hard to say from that particular jpeg, maybe if we can see crop of original tiff? (saved as ziped tiff or 24*png)