I'm interested to know the response of people's monitors to the image linked below. It's a solar eclipse composite recently posted on IIS. All of the individual images have been pasted onto a black background. A few people have told me they can see the edges of the two central cut-outs ('diamond ring' & eclipse proms), while others (including myself) can't see any sign of the edges. Even after darkening the edges considerably people can still see them apparently.
I've tried all available adjustments on my monitor with no result, and even in Photoshop I can't get the edges to show until I raise levels ridiculously. I'm not convinced that this is a calibration issue - rather, it may be a monitor issue. I have an older LCD screen.
Any feedback or opinions would be welcome. Thanks for participating!
Errr? What's a "cut out" Can you post a gross example so I know what I am looking for. Or you could just ignore me and leave it to those who understand.
Errr? What's a "cut out" Can you post a gross example so I know what I am looking for. Or you could just ignore me and leave it to those who understand.
ps. image looks great to me!
Thanks Eric - The two central images in the composite have a small margin right around them. Some people can see the margin against the black background. You & I obviously can't! Hope that helps!
Hi Rob, Great image! I can see the cut outs but only just. I have a very well calibrated Eizo monitor and I had to stretch the image to know what I was looking for first.
To help creating images like this on a monitor which doesn't show such deep shadow detail try this technique:
Create a curves adjustment layer in photoshop and place it at the top of your document. Make the curve a massive upwards curve to brighten the image to a ridiculous level. This will show you what the shadows are doing. Now adjust the edges of any cut outs to make them nice and smooth (preferably by adjusting the layer mask for the cut out layer). Once you have achieved a nice smooth cut out which blends nicely to black you can delete the curves layer. (this technique also works well in reverse for white backgrounds).
Hope this makes sense, but again, this is only a minor issue which probably wouldn't show up in print, and its a great image! Well done.
Thanks Eric - The two central images in the composite have a small margin right around them. Some people can see the margin against the black background. You & I obviously can't! Hope that helps!
Gross example attached!
Cheers -
Thanks Rob, now that I know what the margins look like I can see them faintly in the original. I missed it before as I was looking for a simple rectangular cutout and so I was looking in the wrong place :-)
No, I can't see them. As far as I know my monitor is O.k for calibration but will give it a re-check.
B.T.W Love the image and presentation, Always look forward to your work!
Thanks everyone for your feedback on this. Interesting isn't it, what people are seeing. Allowing for the relatively small sample it seems somewhere around 50-50.
The composite was done on my desktop. Since then, I've opened it on a new laptop, and guess what? I can see the joins, but just! Mind you, the blacks are slightly grey so I probably need to calibrate that screen...
Hope that helps!
I'll go looking again with a hotdesk work computer 
