Your opinion on picture quality please

[Jorgensen]

As I am always trying to adjust to get the optimal quality and most accurate pictures on my items I would like to ask you if those pictures attached looks good on your screens as well?

 

The reason I ask, is because I strive to show the most honest pictures as possible, when putting those items online on my website for sale (tsubashi.com) and because I know pictures looks different on different screens. So far there have never been any complaints on a sale ever, but one can always get better. This Tsuba is by far the most difficult I have experienced to photograph and have choosen this to test with the new settings.

 

Looking forward to your opinions. I will not be offended, only happy for your comments.

[Matsunoki]

Using an iPad to view.
Maybe look a little dark? Have you photoshopped them?

Ps…..excellent way to get our interest!!

How much is this one?…..seriously.

[Brian]

Jimi, the site is looking great.
Oh...and I really like that tsuba. Really really :-)
@rkg would be the expert to ask about that.

[Seth]

Picture quality is great from what I can see. If you have access to a high quality printer you could print the pictures out and compare them side by side. This would elminate any potential screen brightness discrepancies. 

 

But as stated above, for me, would have no problem purchasing off this quality of picture. 

[Brian]

I use Photoshop and barely know 10% of what it can do. And since I'm a little colour blind anyways, that is often a dangerous thing
But I tend to use the adjustments --> Shadow/highlights thing in PS when I see images are a little dark.
This is what it gets me...not sure if this is better or worse?

 

[GoldenDrachen]

 

 

I have discovered that the best results you will get when pictures of practically any tsuba made  on the dark background (dark cloth, black panel etc.)

If you need white background, then you will require  extra light sources. Like softboxes. (I have 3 for this purpose) or reflectors.

Natural lighting (overcast) is the best. 

Place your tsuba on the dark background, bring it close to the window, even a window sill will do. Light should fall under some angle.

If you have too much of the sun, the picture will be too contrasty, and you can use  a piece of white light paper or fabric to disperse sun rays.

Then just make a picture.

I have Photoshop on my smartphone, but I use it mostly for cropping and resizing images to match forum upload requirements.

 

Regards

Vitaly

 

[Spartancrest]

I like Brian's image, the lighter details show out better - it is always better in hand than any image you can display, images on sale sites are really only ever going to be a guide anyway. [some use poor quality images to disguise problems, which only makes you check them better - or it should if you know your stuff!]

Jimi-san you might pop the tsuba over on to the humorous thread - Tanuki and the frog/toad look very merry! Lovely guard.

[Steves87]

I think your photos are just fine for sale, although a little dark on the first one. But I totally get your point, and I totally understand your issues with photography. I myself, am not that competent when it comes to photography, but I have found three things which improve my photos when trying to convey the correct colours, and minimise shadows.

The first two are a little bit contrary to Vitaly's experience, and they are using a beige to brown background (not white or black, I just cannot get it to work) and not using natural (diffused sun) light. I found that warm/yellow light (diffused) seems to work best so far. The only way to get rid of shadows behind the Tsuba from what I can tell, is to have a semi lit background at least 1 to 2 inches away. This means you need to use either a stand or a suspended clear glass/perspex plate (if laying flat). 

For sun vs lights comparison, the picture below is supposed to show you a Tsuba with what I would assume is a very similar colour to your example. The two pictures at the top are pretty much the exact colour of the guard 'in hand' (according to my computer and mobile screen settings). These top pictures were done with diffused warm light on a suspended perspex plate (no shadows) with a dark beige card below. The lower two pictures were done using diffused sunlight and sitting directly onto a pressed-card plate (shadows). The lower pictures do not show the real colours, however, they do show interesting extra colour details which are seemingly not visible to the naked eye. 

This is where I'm at with the photography of Tsuba, plenty more to learn, I know.

[Matsunoki]

  On 5/16/2023 at 10:38 AM, Brian said:

This is what it gets me...not sure if this is better or worse?

Expand  

Better, significantly imo. 
Jimi-san’s second image is better than the first which was too dark.

[kissakai]

I think I'd takes a few images and use one for colour and one for detail

If I sell I add a comment this it is slightly darker or lighter

Detail is the most important but I've bought a few tsuba where the patina seems washed out or 'thin' but the seller will say the patina is fine and I've been disappointed yet

 

[Jorgensen]

Thank you for your help and comments, very helpful.

 

I have tried playing around a bit with the images and have inserted below. I think they are quite ok - at least on my screen. Perhaps still a bit to the dark side. The front of Tsuba is darker than backside btw.

 

@Matsunoki Haha, thanks. It was not my intention to catch your interest whis way. This Tsuba have been really dificult for me to shoot natural pictures of and no matter my light settings, pics became very "artificial" and unnatural, which bothered me. It have not been my intention to sell this Tsuba, however, if interested, please feel free to send me a PM (eventually with an offer) and lets discuss it.

 

@Brian (and others) I have shot those pictures on gray background actually. I found this solution to bring out the natural look much better than on white background. Its like the camera "reacts" much better, when background is not white. Yes, I use and are quite experienced with photoshop and the shadow/highlight tool are great. I actually just had forgot a bit about this tool, so thank you for reminding me about it. I try to shoot the pictures as best as possible right away for 2 reasons. First is that the better the picture are, the less time I need to use to correct it. Other reason is that, when editing in photoshop, you can very easily "over-edit" and make more worse than good. 

 

I am very thankful to your all. I have for a long time felt my pictures was okay, but not quite as natural as I wanted them to be and it seems I am finally on the right path I think.

 

 

A little about the Tsuba:

 

Left side is translated to:
道寿之住  Michitoshi no saku

 

Right side is translated to:
東都小西湖畔 - Toto Konishi Konan kore Ju - (On the shores of Lake Konishi in the Eastern Capital (now Tokyo))

 

MITO school

 

8.20 mm x 7.60 mm x 0.40 mm (at nakago-ana)

 

 

If any knows the story/motif of this Tsuba, Im all ears... It looks like an odd party with a tadpole trying to escape it 

  

 

 

[zanilu]

@Jorgensen your pictures look pretty good to me. 

 

I struggled a lot to produce acceptable pictures, at least to me. I always prefer to take my shot with a dark background inside a lightbox made of withe plastic with led light placed outside to provide a diffuse light. To avoid sharp shadows the tsuba is suspended 50 mm above the background.

I always place a white piece of paper inside the shot to do color correction with gimp taking the white as a reference. The two sides of the box opposed to the light sources are obscured with a sheet of the same material used for the background to avoid reflections. To avoid stray light I shot in a darkened room.

The results are pretty good in terms of color. Here is an example from a recent post of mine.

 

Regards

Luca

 

 

 

[rkg]

Jimi-san,

 

I always seem to be late to the party on these.  Apologies in advance if the following sounds addled - I'm still not feeling that great, so...

 

First off, be glad you are doing this now rather than in the bad old days when everybody had CRT monitors - they could be all over the place in terms of color temperature, gamma settings, intensity, etc., and worse yet everybody was convinced their monitors were perfect so it was a losing proposition to even try and have a conversation about what they saw on their monitor (diatribe about hours wasted trying to convince people who had no idea about color management/monitor calibration/etc that their monitor might be off omitted - suffice to say I just started always printing proofs to send after that).  While people still do odd adjustments, its much less common now, so you -could- talk about lighting the images so you still can get a feeling for what the piece looks like I think.

 

Probably the simplest way to model it would be to think of it as a limited color space where you have to reduce the contrast/dynamic range and probably a reduced range of colors as well (though fortunately, you may not run into that often) - and if you light accordingly (reduce the overall contrast /dynamic range of the image) you can probably get a good result, though that is a little unsatisfying as a photographer as using a large dynamic range lets you show more.

 

Again there are books on color management that describe in gory detail all the problems with trying to get what you see on a monitor to match the item.  About all you can do is make -your- colors as accurate as possible. I personally pretty much do a unique color profile for  -every- image I care about, though you -can- just measure your typical lighting and apply that profile in to groups of images.   If nothing else, you -can- put a target somewhere in the image space and just do a white balance adjustment to it.  I have become a big fan of these little step wedges, as you can use the gray to set your lighting intensity, and the white to do a white balance adjustment, and... they have a scale too (although it looks like they no longer run it down one side unfortunately)

 

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/286667-REG/QP_Card_GQP101_Qp_Calibration_Card_101.html

 

For actual profile generation I use a calbrite colorchecker.  I prefer using some kind of profile generation like this as it allows you to dial out many problems with the sensor/what adobe decided to add to their camera profile, etc - I started doing this waaay back when I was shooting with a 5D mkII as canon had messsed with the reds in a way that was almost impossible to dial out manually.
 

https://calibrite.com/us/product/colorchecker-passport-duo/

 

(note that they got little un's Bigger 'uns, part of a kit with a monitor calibrator (another good thing for you to look into), etc.).

 

But that's all a huge digression, as you were asking about your images.

 

The front one looks like it could stand to either have the contrast reduced (shadows lighter) or you need to spend some time adding lighting to "shape" the badger and frog - I'm not sure what you wanted to show there - the back seems to reveal most everything, though if you are working on lighting the front the fish on the back might also be improved (the face on the fish is kind of cool and not emphasized)

 

But even then you have to watch doing that too much because in hand its actually hard to see everything at once (and that can lead to unhappy buyers since they generally do not have optimal lighting)  - I'll often take a lot of pictures rotating the piece through identical light. 

 

I assume you shot these under somewhat identical light, so the color difference is there, correct?  This actually is not that uncommon on kinko work, fwiw - I've always assumed it had to do with one side being "protected" by the otoshi and the other being on display, but what do I know.

Best,

rkg

(Richard George)