Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=873127&Start=1&Artist=syntheticdreamer&ByArti

I was really happy with this photo that i took, however i was dissapointed in only one thing. The way the lights turned out really brings down the viewing pleasure for me.

Please excuse the lower quality of the upload, max 200kb ;p

I know it has something to do with digitalizing, but does anyone know how i can prevent this or how to ammend it?

Your help would be greatly appreciated

Thanks

Chris

I don't know exactly but from the experience with various digital cameras I have by now: the lamps are overexposed as you got the exposure right for the street; one workaround is to make a series with varying exposure values, another to do the metering on both areas and make two shots with the same view; combining shots may give better results. the underlying reason is that the dynamical range of a "normal" CCD is smaller than that of film

As a sidenote, I think that border is wrong for this picture. Big white border with a dark picture doesn't work for me.

Hate re-working jpegs, but anyway ... this is a really quick fix and a little sloppy. I have to leave for work in a couple minutes. I only did the first 2 lights. This was an attempt to try and add more levels of tone back into that area. To do it for real would take a bit of care and more time. If you want to try it, let me know and I'll explain what I did. The problem is called posterization. There are usually 2 causes, first one is what GWFA explains above. The second is when you "step to hard" on an image when processing it. What that means is that by adjusting levels or curves or whatever else, you overstretch the data (usually seen as a comb-like look in your histogram). In either case, what it means is that you have too few levels of data trying to represent a lot of different tones. For instance, lets say you have lights like yours. There might be 100 different tones in that area going out from the very bright center to the darker edges. You may only have 5-10 tones available to represent that. So you end up with big areas of solid color that give you that ugly look instead of a nice smooth gradation. I can think of 3 solutions. First is, again, what gwfa suggests above. Second is, if it's not in the original image, you need to process it differently to limit the damage (meaning use multiple layers and blend). Third is, you can try to fix like I've done above, but it's a pain to get really good results and takes a little time. -=>Donald