Editing Help required please

Steve M · 25 Jun 2011 at 12:07

I took this sunrise photo in Kefalonia last year. As you can see there is a lot of banding on it, which after several failed attempts, i cannot get rid of:

P1010479 by Steve Millward, on Flickr

Does any kind soul fancy having a go at correcting this for me and cleaning up the image in general?

Here is a link to the original RAW file: http://www.mediafire.com/file/ln83l23k722qk9g/P1010479.rw2

It would be great if you could then save it as a JPEG and link me to the full size finished version. A lot to ask i know, but i really like this photo which brings back great memories of my holiday.

juno_first · 25 Jun 2011 at 13:49

At first guess it looks like a compression artifact & the RAW prooved this with just the regular digital noise.
Choose something other than jpg & something with a less lossy compression.

juno_first · 25 Jun 2011 at 13:59

Using PNG I managed get it down to <400kb for 800x531.

Steve M · 25 Jun 2011 at 14:28

OK cheers, seems the distortion is intorduced when i upload it to flickr.

20mb is my file size limit for uploads to flickr. Whats the best way of reducing the file size whilst retaining the highest resolution for the pic?

While i'm at it, what format does everyone use for their photosstored on hard drives, DVD's ect?

juno_first · 25 Jun 2011 at 15:27

Im new to digital photography & just keep the NEF/RAW + fine jpg from the camera.
As you've found out with eg. jpg, not all subjects will work great with this compressor.
I usually upload with jpg at a mostly lossless %.

miniyazz · 25 Jun 2011 at 17:49

I'm currently just sticking with RAW and JPG also. But again new to photography so this might yet change.

For lossless I would use either TIFF or PNG, personally, but JPG is useful for small file sizes.