Elements of a photograph that are generally undesirable or have a negative impact. Examples include noise, flare, dead or hot pixels, sensor "spots", reflections inside the camera/lens system, etc.
34
votes
3answers
13k views
What is moiré? How can we avoid it?
What is the image defect called "moiré"? What causes it, and how can we avoid or reduce it? Is it related to "false color"?
4
votes
2answers
217 views
Small, faint circle in corner of image. What is it?
I've started to notice a faint darkened circle in my photos. I tried to clean the lenses and I still see it.
What's causing these circles?
Link to imgur album since I don't have enough rep to post ...
4
votes
2answers
199 views
How to avoid fringes? [duplicate]
What can I do avoid fringes around a subject in my pictures?
My camera is a bridge camera (namely a fujifilm hsr20).
5
votes
4answers
358 views
Why do my photos show blocky gradients, even in RAW?
I am learning to use my new DSLR, a Sony a57 with 18-55mm kit lens. I was shooting last night at sundown, and after exporting the RAW images to Lightroom, was surprised to see the gradient as showing ...
5
votes
2answers
755 views
Why does darkening skies in Photoshop cause banding, and how can I avoid it?
I am pretty new to Photoshop (I have Elements 10). When I darken highlights I find that the sky ends up in bands. I have read advice that says to reduce the effect of this by using either blur or ...
4
votes
1answer
311 views
Lens Flare with My 50mm 1.8 Canon Prime Lens
I've purchased my little new lens Canon 50mm F1.8 .. But now I'm really disappointed for it's result especially in night photography :(
In any night shot a lot of lens flares appear in my photo, I've ...
9
votes
7answers
3k views
Why does using flash sometimes create these white spots in the photo?
I have an Olympus FE-190. When I take a picture, with flash on Digital Image Stabilizer (DIS) mode, I get white spots in pictures. This doesn't happen always.
There is only an option called Pixel ...
5
votes
3answers
942 views
Why are there white dots on my night time photo?
Could you please explain why I am getting white semi-transparent dots for night photography with flash on?
Original image here.
3
votes
2answers
266 views
Are these ghost light spots and vertical grain indication that my scratched polarizer is ruined?
Earlier, I unfortunately dropped my polarizer. There doesn't seem to be any damage save for a light scratch which I've uncovered only after a very thorough inspection. Nonetheless, I'm worried that ...
2
votes
3answers
375 views
What could cause pink spots on my RAW photos?
I have only started shooting in RAW and have noticed pink spots on them. They are never in the same location and don't affect some photos, they just seem to appear every few shots.
It never happened ...
15
votes
6answers
3k views
What are jpeg artifacts and what can be done about them?
I know JPEG is a "lossy" compression algorithm that discards information in order to save space. What is the visual impact of this? I've heard of "JPEG artifacts". What do these look like?
Are there ...
7
votes
2answers
157 views
What does it mean to excite aliases?
I recently came across the phrase 'excited aliases.' The phrase seems to be related to lens sharpness in some way. While a web search turns up the phrase a few times, I am unable to locate a decent ...
0
votes
1answer
133 views
How do I remove halos around a replaced sky in a black and white photo?
I am looking for a bit of advice from some Photoshop experts out there. I have a photo in which I have replaced the original dull sky (method explained below) with a sky that is a deeper blue and has ...
5
votes
1answer
226 views
What is this pattern artifact in a Hasselblad H4D picture?
Shot some shoots with Hasselblad H4D-50 and in (at least) one of them the following artifact(s) appeared:
Of course some questions arise:
What is this? (moire?)
Why it happened? (aside of lack ...
3
votes
2answers
264 views
Why is there glow around lights in every photo shot with my Canon EF 28-70mm f/2.8 L USM Lens?
One day after using my Canon EF 28-70mm f/2.8 L USM Lens, I noticed that every photo has a huge amount of glow in the dark areas near any light area.
I tested my other four lenses to figure out if ...
3
votes
1answer
116 views
RAW export in Aperture giving square “grid” pattern over noise
I have a RAW photo in aperture that has quite a lot of noise. When I export the photo to JPEG (and TIFF/PSD, 16 bit) I get a strange square grid like pattern on the photo.
Here is an example of the ...
5
votes
2answers
304 views
What causes these green dots in my image?
I just received a 35mm f/1.8 DX lens for my Nikon D50 for Christmas, and took some shots where the lights on the tree were the main source of illumination. Almost all of them exhibit very prominent ...
11
votes
2answers
291 views
What's the reason for this exceedingly blue reflection from buildings in this image?
I've noticed that lately my camera has some issues with blue neon lights. Here's an example shot.
You can notice the effect in the reflection of the water in a building and in the blue dome of ...
19
votes
2answers
1k views
What is noise in a digital photograph?
What kinds of effects are present in digital images that are referred to as "noise"?
What are the different sources of noise?
What causes each type of noise?
What are the characteristics of the ...
3
votes
1answer
255 views
Why does flare appear in photographs of sun or fire?
What is the new color that forms in the image when photographing a sun or similar things (see attachment with a rose glare)?
Why and how it forms?
Is it good for a image?
How to increase or ...
5
votes
3answers
438 views
White spots on some photos
I'm fairly new here and fairly new to photography too. So I'm hoping someone can help me out here. You see, there is this white spot that appears in my photos and I don't know what causes it. It ...
3
votes
1answer
168 views
Is there a name for artifacts for taking a photo of LCD / LED screens and how to remove or avoid it?
The following is a photo of a game console 3DS, although the 3D is turned off:
There is "fish nest" artifacts, and sometimes the lines even curve on some photos. iPhotos on a Mac seems to try to ...
8
votes
4answers
607 views
How do I eliminate lens flare in my pictures?
I have taken a few pictures that show these circles, and I'm getting very annoyed at this problem. Seems most common on sunny days. This particular picture is not my own, but it is a good example of ...
28
votes
7answers
2k views
How can I stop my HDR shots looking so fake?
All my attempts at HDR come out looking remarkably fake, how can I reduce the halos effect?
8
votes
2answers
652 views
Why do my photos look like they're painted?
I'm not an expert, but all the photos I take look like they've been painted. It doesn't look like normal blur.
I'm using a FinePix S2500HD and the following photo was taken at 1/2000 exposure. I ...
6
votes
2answers
213 views
What causes a band-like pattern in photos of a CFL?
CFL Image
The image in the above link is that of a compact fluorescent light bulb.
I couldn't figure out the reason for the formation of light and dark bands sort of thing in the image. The same ...
7
votes
1answer
258 views
What causes the spots in my IR photos?
Below are images I've shot recently while experiminting with IR photography. The first is an IR image with +2 stops of exposure and a custom white balance based on the bright part of the tag on the ...
3
votes
2answers
245 views
What is causing the cyan outline in the building in the background of this image?
I took this picture the other day. It's a JPEG from the Fujifilm X-Pro1. The sky is overexposed as was necessary to light Anya brightly — and because I was playing with shooting wide open, and that ...
3
votes
1answer
680 views
What causes longitudinal chromatic aberration on Nikon 50mm f/1.4D?
I have looked on my new 50mm lens photo (I have Nikon D90) and I see "purple fringing" around the unfocused objects (longitudinal chromatic aberration). What's is going on? Is it common for this lens ...
4
votes
2answers
238 views
How do I avoid white color in the sky near my subject with HDR photos?
I have created a HDR image from a single raw file. The way I have created it was
Open the RAW file in Photoshop camera raw.
Do some adjustments like enhancing the color, cropping etc.
Exporting the ...
7
votes
5answers
524 views
Are these blotches of wrong color caused by a corrupt SD card?
My old camera was taking images that had blotches of the wrong colors when zoomed in, and I take a lot of macro pictures. I bought a new camera and put my old sd card into it and now it's doing the ...
8
votes
2answers
552 views
Why does the left windmill have too many blades?
Ok, check this shot out:
These are the 3 windmills in Marshfield Massachusetts. It was shot from Provincetown, MA about 35 miles away. (I wasn't out to shoot them, I was shooting Right Whales... I ...
3
votes
2answers
406 views
Why does my photo look great in Lightroom but show sharpening halos on my web site?
I haven't over sharpened my photo — it looks great in Lightroom and Photoshop CS5, but when I upload it to my webpage, it has horrible ghosts/halos around much of the subjects. I have tried it with ...
4
votes
4answers
522 views
What is causing increased noise in my recent photos?
In the last two shoots I've taken I have noticed much more noise in the resulting photos. In the first instance, I put this down to my fault, as I was shooting at high ISO levels, but in the second ...
6
votes
1answer
228 views
Is camera damage causing these severe diagonal lines from concentrated light sources?
Since a week or so, I have severe diagonal stripes around light-sources in my night-time photographs on my Canon Powershot A650. In the past, I had some (I guess due to Fraunhofer diffraction, see ...
3
votes
2answers
177 views
Where do these “redshifts” and “blueshifts” come from?
I make many product photos for the company I work for. For this I use Canon 400D with two external flash devices Walimex CY-600K.
I've noticed an interesting effect on many of the photos I take with ...
11
votes
4answers
2k views
How to avoid jpeg compression artefacts when saving photos in web resolution?
When I save a web-resolution image (for example, 1920×1024px), flat areas tints often have damaged shades of color. I'm saving in Photoshop CS4 with quality 2 in standard mode, because I need the ...
1
vote
2answers
331 views
What causes strange spiral pattern on my star line?
Ok, so I created this test image. The camera was behind the window, I just tested long exposure photography on the single star I saw. It was about 20 minutes of expo, star was out of focus (I really ...
0
votes
3answers
1k views
What is the cause of these round spots on my photograph? [duplicate]
Possible Duplicate:
Dust-like speck visible every few pictures — is it dust, or worse?
Is this a finger print on the lens? I don't know.
What can be the cause of the round spot on this ...
6
votes
5answers
3k views
Why is my camera showing a lot of stuck red and white pixels?
After shooting for one hour with my Rebelt2i + Tamron 17-55 f2.8, I went back home and checked pictures on my computer.
For every single picture, there are a lot of 'dead' pixels at the same ...
7
votes
1answer
372 views
Dust-like speck visible every few pictures — is it dust, or worse?
I seem to have to dust-like speck on my Sony Cybershot S950's lens, but it appears randomly every few pictures. Could something be going bad internally?
1
vote
1answer
748 views
What is causing this white spot in every photo with my D90?
Recently I noticed that the photographs from my D90 has an odd white dot in it. The dot is present in every image. The dot becomes clearly visible as I zoom into the image. I have attached a photo ...
4
votes
2answers
290 views
Is it normal for the Canon kit lens to exhibit lens flare even without a UV filter?
I recently bought a Canon 550D and have been experimenting with this for a week. I have been pretty satisfied with the quality, until I faced this lens flare problem. Notice the unwanted blue light ...
3
votes
0answers
338 views
Why do I have a red dot in every photo? [duplicate]
Possible Duplicate:
Why is my camera showing a lot of stuck red and white pixels?
Every picture that I took today have a red dot on the same place in every photo. It looks like a monitor ...
8
votes
2answers
395 views
Why do I get horizontal grey bar with flash at shutter speeds slower than max sync speed?
I'm a total newbie to flash photography, and I am just trying to do some test shooting with Canon Speedlite 580 EXII using my 7D.
I saw on the user manual that the maximum sync speed is 1/250 sec.
...
12
votes
4answers
2k views
How can I avoid soft dull “spots” in my pictures?
Recently, I've been doing a lot more photography, particularly with my 100-400mm telephoto and 16-35mm wide. I am skilled enough that I can capture the shot mostly as I want with just the camera gear, ...
2
votes
1answer
275 views
What is causing strange horizontal “flare” on all my photos regardless of lens and/or POV?
Suddenly on (almost) all photos I have a strange light band in the middle, regardless of lens and or angle on which I shoot the photos. The camera is an old Canon 1Ds Mk II and AFIAS the line of light ...
8
votes
4answers
1k views
Why are those green spots on my photo?
Took a pic with my 35mm Nikon lens last night, and got this light artifact. Is this something normal? Reflection? Is it dirt on my lens? How do I prevent this from happening? I think it only happened ...
4
votes
2answers
283 views
What creates this strange flare and how to prevent it?
I shot at a concert for the first time. The pictures were pretty good for the capability of my equipment, but on some shots, the light has a very strange flare. It isn't the usual rays, but some soft, ...
4
votes
1answer
313 views
How to prevent weird spots and stripes on photos of window glass?
A few days ago I took photos of a nice curvy business center in another city. Later I discovered that many frames had weird artifacts on the glass, shown below as 100% crops.
An almost normal shot:
...
