Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/PetronasTowers

PetronasTowers

The Petronas Towers

Extreme image cut-off. Not the Best Wikipedia has to offer. Is the image computer-animated? If so, it should be replaced with an image of the completed project and completely portraying both towers (image appears fake). Also, image blurred surrounding the Towers' connecting bridge.

Nominate and Delist. - AJ24 19:42, 18 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Keep Doesn't appear fake to me, and I feel that the cutting off doesn't detract from it's appeal. PPGMD 21:59, 18 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Delist per nom--Vircabutar 22:10, 18 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Keep per PPGMD --Fir0002 22:35, 18 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Keep -- Chris 73 | Talk 22:39, 18 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Delist. I agree that the image looks fake -- and that's because it shares some of the same faults as the Pangong Lake image. The unnatural blue color in the sky is very much like that in the Pangong Lake image. It also exhibits vignetting, oversaturation and excessive contrast. At 100% it's obviously a soft image that's been oversharpened to compensate. -- moondigger 22:55, 18 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Keep This is a gorgeous photo of the towers -- ShinmaWa^(talk) 04:44, 19 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Delist Per moondigger --Glaurung 06:04, 19 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Delist. Its a spectacular view but not a spectacular image. Diliff | (Talk) (Contribs) 15:10, 19 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. Excellent angle and lighting. I don't understand why you are criticizing all of these images when viewed at their maximum resolution. The important thing is that they look right at the resolution used in their respective articles. This isn't Commons FPC, after all. — BRIAN0918 • 2006-07-19 20:23
- Because the featured picture criteria say images should be "high quality," not to mention "Wikipedia's best work." This image violates both criteria. If the "important thing" is that they look alright at the resolution used in their articles, then why bother with minimum resolution requirements at all? A 240x320 image is more than big enough for the vast majority of articles. Why bother keeping the yellow mite image nearly 4000 pixels tall? Why keep the Grauman's Theatre image at more than 4000 pixels and 5.8 MB? These are all rhetorical questions, of course. The reason why we judge featured picture candidates at their full resolutions is obvious -- because they don't deserve to be featured if they only look acceptable in thumbnails. Besides which, this image doesn't even look good in the thumbnail, IMO. It looks fake, as if somebody used the paint bucket tool in Photoshop to fill in the sky with the most unnatural, garish shade of blue they could find, then purposefully darkened the corners a bit to simulate vignetting.-- moondigger 02:03, 20 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  - Note. Compare the sky in this image with the sky in the Grecian Cat image immediately below -- despite its faults, the cat image contains a realistic blue sky. -- moondigger 02:35, 20 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    - Well the image was obviously taken at twilight, when such a sky is perfectly expected. See Image:Melbourne yarra twilight.jpg --Fir0002 02:40, 20 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      - It doesn't look like it was taken at twilight to me, and the metadata seems to indicate it was taken well before twilight, if it can be trusted. Even if it was taken at twilight, the contrast and saturation have been pumped up beyond reasonable limits; see the STS-98 image you worked on for a more realistic depiction of a twilight sky. Besides, you certainly can't claim the Pangong Lake image was taken at twilight, and it shares the same fake-looking blue color that the sky in this one has. (BTW, I think the saturation on the Melbourne twilight image is a bit much too... though certainly nowhere near as pumped as Pangong Lake or this image.) -- moondigger 02:59, 20 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]
        Look I'm not talking about Pagong Lake, and it has no relevance to this image. They are unique and distinct. Independent if you see what I mean. And of course it's taken at twlight, as otherwise the lights wouldn't be on! --Fir0002 05:48, 20 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]
        The relevence to this image is the sky. You're suggesting that the sky is the color it is because the image was taken at twilight. Yet it shares the same color as the Pangong lake image, which was clearly not taken at twilight. Fine, then... forget about the Pangong Lake image here. This particular color does not resemble any sky I've ever seen in person, twilight or otherwise. It's a result of pumping contrast and saturation up beyond reasonable limits, IMO. It's one of the reasons I oppose it. -- moondigger 13:57, 20 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]
        The mistake you seem to be making is that you're assuming your eyes see colour and light the same way a camera does. I've taken many many photos that have a very similar sky to this, both during the day and at night. Any clear blue sky has the potential to look like that if you expose it that way (eg underexpose), but it is particularly easy to do at twilight simply because that is the luminosity of the sky that typically corresponds with the correct exposure for the nightscape - give or take a stop or two, anyway. Diliff | (Talk) (Contribs) 11:40, 21 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]
        Diliff, I've been shooting landscapes for 20 years. I know how film and digital sensors react to light and color, and how that differs from the way eyes react to light and color. I've taken over 15,000 exposures on digital alone, probably triple that on film. The closest I've ever gotten to this color is with Fuji Velvia slide film, a film commonly referred to as "DisneyChrome" and well-known to be oversaturated and super-high contrast. Even on Velvia, no matter what the exposure or time of day, I've never gotten something quite as garish as the Pangong Lake sky. See this image: [1] for an example of what a properly-exposed twilight sky looks like on Velvia. Only when I've underexposed Velvia at twilight have I gotten a few exposures somewhat similar to the Petronas Towers sky. But even then, I would have to pump up the saturation even more post-scan to match it.

On digital, I've never gotten anything anywhere close to this in an out-of-camera exposure, even if I underexposed. It would be easy to make one look like this, though... just move the saturation slider a couple dozen points to the right, and boost the contrast too. My complaint is that when people pump up the contrast and saturation post-exposure, they should take care to insure they're not pushing too far beyond what's natural. That's clearly what happened in both the Pangong Lake image and this one.

I never said it was impossible to have skies look like this; I said that when they do it's due to overzealous post-processing. Of course there are photographers who prefer oversaturated, high-contrast images, no matter how fake they look. I'm not one of them... and furthermore, even if such images are marginally acceptable in a travel brochure, they're entirely inappropriate in an encyclopedia, which I believe should aim for accurate representations. -- moondigger 13:48, 21 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah but what I'm saying, and what I assume Diliff is saying, is that skies like that are not always the result of overzealous post-processing. Here's another example, I took this for my brother when he made that site. That's straight out of my Kodak. I'm not knocking your experience, but personally in the short time I've been taking photos, I've often come across twilight skies which look like that in reality. Another possiblity, although it doesn't look that way, is that it was an exposure bracket and the sky was part of the under-exposed frame. Maybe it's just Australian/Asian skies :-) --Fir0002 09:50, 22 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, and another twilight shot by Diliff: Image:London Eye Twilight April 2006.jpg --Fir0002 10:39, 22 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Fir, neither of the images you linked as examples have skies that look anything like the Petronas Towers sky to me. They look good; they resemble skies I have seen in real life and have photographed myself. As I said previously, the Petronas sky looks like somebody picked a garish blue shade and filled in the sky with the paint bucket tool in Photoshop. Do you really not see the difference between this one (garish, fake-looking) and those you linked to (pleasing, natural, realistic)? -- Moondigger 14:34, 22 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I do see a slight difference, but not a lot to go on to say it's "fake". If you look in my image, it shows a nice gradient. Due to the size of the towers (and therefore the trajectory of the camera), the towers would be depicted on the part of the gradient where the colors look like that. I don't see it was being too unrealistic personally. --Fir0002 10:22, 23 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've recieved confirmation from the photographer. The image was taken "7 or 8 o'clock in the evening". See my talk page on the commons for his complete response. --Fir0002 11:42, 26 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, but it still looks overprocessed to me, making the sky look unrealistic (despite being taken late in the day) and has other problems (previously listed). All of the other twilight sky examples you or I have posted look much more realistic to me. -- Moondigger 02:13, 27 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

- - What you're not realizing is that there is more to "quality" than resolution and sharpness. — BRIAN0918 • 2006-07-20 05:35
    - If all I was concerned about was resolution and sharpness, I would never criticize composition, lighting, color, contrast, saturation, etc. In fact, I tend to put more stock in those aspects than resolution... but I was told when I started participating here that resolution was important, that even images that met the requirement might be rejected unless they exceeded the stated requirements. So I consider resolution when I analyze images, even though I might not have given it as much weight under other circumstances. -- moondigger 13:57, 20 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      - Various things are important. But none is be-all end-all, as you seem to suggest. — BRIAN0918 • 2006-07-20 14:44

Delist per others. Really looks bad enlarged. gren グレン 02:36, 20 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Delist. Fantastic image with unfortunate compression artefacts. - Samsara (talk • contribs) 11:07, 20 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Delist. We have to be able to do better than this. It's not as if it's "hard" to get a shot of the towers at night. --Dante Alighieri | Talk 19:08, 20 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Delist per Samsara. Jono (talk) 13:29, 22 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]
delist. While it is a beuatiful image to look at, I think it is too cut-off and lacks enough encyclopaedic value to be featured. say1988 18:48, 22 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Delist. washed out and blurry at full res. --Dschwen 18:42, 24 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Comment. Image is Copyrighted. -- AJ24 01:50, 26 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Delisted 11 Delist, 5 Keep Fir0002 10:30, 27 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

A comment from the photographer

A few days ago I found out that this photograph I took in Kuala Lumpur more than three years ago was no longer a featured picture on English Wikipedia. At the time when it was featured, I felt really happy about it, so finding out that this is no longer the case has been a bit of a disappointment. Of course, I can perfectly understand that not everyone would like the picture, but what I have found really distressing is the fact that people are suggesting that the picture has been heavily postprocessed, even using the word "fake" to describe it. On the contrary, I can assure that this is not the case at all. In fact, the picture is not even cropped and the only processing it has received was the digital copy from the film which was done at the Tesco store in England where I had several rolls of film developed. This is an important fact that many Wikipedia users seem to have overlooked: the original picture is film, not digital, which explains why the quality of the image in terms of lighting is much superior to what you would expect from an originally digital image. The metadata do not come from the moment the picture was taken, but rather from the equipment used by Tesco to create a CD of pictures from developed film. I have to say that the developed picture looks even more impressive, sharper and less blurry, than the digital copy. I don't really know how I managed to take such beautiful pictures (I have another similar one); I am not a professional photographer and I didn't even use a tripod; I was just holding my camera in front of the towers. I think I was lucky to take the picture at a moment of the day (evening of Thursday, 13 May 2004) when the lighting conditions were particularly good and, besides, I was using a very good camera, my dear old Nikon FM2 with a Nikkor 50mm 1/1.8 lens. The 50 mm lens made it difficult for me to get as much of the towers as I wanted in the picture. The angle is actually the effect of me trying to make them fit within the picture while I was standing in front of the towers. At the end of my Asian trip, in July 2004, I took my rolls of film to the Tesco store on Newmarket Road in Cambridge, England, where I had them developed. They gave me a CD with the digital copies of the pictures for each roll. That's where the image I uploaded comes from. Later, a Commons user edited the picture with some sort of blur effect to make it look less grainy. This is the story of this picture, plain old-fashioned photography with a no-frills Nikon FM2 camera. --Gelo 23:19, 4 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]