Impressed...

[RonM]

Was out for a walk earlier this evening with the Alpha 900 and took this, what impressed me was, that zooming in with PSE6 at 100% the detail was to me impressive so here is a 100% crop from the original JPeg 6.5 Meg file (I save RAW & JPeg) using a 70 - 210 'Beercan' 1/80th @ f/4.5



The file has been cropped (to the 100%), resized to 72ppi 600x400, sharpened and uploaded to photobucket. I'm probably doing something wrong 'cause there has been detail lost in comparison to what the original on screen is showing.

[RonM]

And here is the full scale shot resized for photobucket

Moderator: yes - but well over-sized for these forums!

http://i526.photobucket.com/albums/c...s/_DSC0125.jpg

[huwevans]

I'm probably doing something wrong 'cause there has been detail lost in comparison to what the original on screen is showing.

Yup...

The file has been ... resized

That's your problem. A 100% crop is one that has not been resized - IOW each pixel of the crop corresponds precisely to a pixel from the original file - i.e. without any recomputation to fit the image into a smaller (or larger - but in this case it's smaller) number of pixels. Don't re-size, and you will not lose the detail. But you will need to crop a smaller piece in the first place if you want the resulting image to fit into the 600x600 pixel limit for these forums. By my reckoning you actually started with a chunk of the image about 1300 pixels wide, before resizing it down.

[RonM]

Sorry Huw for the over size, and after taking your advice here is a cropped part of the original image to 564 x 379 pixels uploaded directly to Photobucket

[huwevans]

Something's still not going right, Ron, because it's 320x215 pixels as posted here - perhaps Photobucket is doing some further resizing, beyond your control? If you can upload directly to your own webspace (most ISPs supply their users with several MBs of free space) then you can retain control over the image. If a third-party hosting site is re-sizing it that will also adversely affect image quality in terms of things like JPEG compression, sharpening, etc.

[Zou]

Tech issues aside, that's stunning IQ. I have been very impressed with some a900 images on the web, and this is no exception.

[RonM]

That does seem to be the case Huw, the upload options for Photobucket seem to be set from a drop down list. I do have space from my ISP, which I used to use then they changed the process for managing it and for me it sort of went T*ts up, I should go back and see if I can resurrect the space and use it.

[RonM]

Tech issues aside, that's stunning IQ. I have been very impressed with some a900 images on the web, and this is no exception.

considering the lens used is probably 20+ years old and based on a design that is over 30 years old I can see why the old Minolta 'beercan' has increased in price on e-bay if all the new Sony Alpha users are after it!

Although you cant see the full impact here, what really impressed me is the resolution straight out of the camera, it brought immediately to mind the recent issue of the top secret documents snapped in Downing Street, my estimation is that I was 4 - 5 times more distant from the Lambs than the 'Tog' who took the Downing Street shot but when the JPeg was viewed in elements 6 and zoomed in by 200% I could clearly make out the number 8 on the lambs ear tag, which I would estimate is about the size of a Two Pence coin.