Cover Photo

[imatfaal]

I realise this is pretty meaningless but I do like the new cover photo option - it is accessed from the top right of one's profile screen and allows an uploaded photo to be used as the backdrop of your profile page.  Mine is a panorama shot taken from Barf in the Lake District in the NE of England taken whilst walking there four or five years ago with my Brother and Sister-in-law

This is what I mean http://www.scienceforums.net/profile/32514-imatfaal/ it is fairly inconsequential but a nice personalizing touch

[iNow]

Maybe I'm missing something simple, but I can't seem to find a way to edit it. I can change my Profile details, my Profile photo/avatar, but not (as far as I can tell) my cover photo. Maybe permissions need to be updated for non-staff? 

[imatfaal]

 

Just in case you are missing the button - it is so easy to not see something right in front of one's eyes; the arrow to click is about a third of the way down on the right hand edge of the screen shot. 

In parallel will investigate if this is a staff only feature or weather it can be unlocked for vveryone

[CharonY]

Just checked, I do not have that button. I.e. it looks like a staff only feature.

[iNow]

Exactly. I have the Edit Profile button only, but no button beside it for Cover Photo (no drop-down, no button, no nothing). Looks like we've isolated root cause as being user permissions.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

Whoops. Somehow it defaulted to not being allowed. Should be fixed now.

[iNow]

1 minute ago, Cap'n Refsmmat said:

Whoops. Somehow it defaulted to not being allowed. Should be fixed now.

Confirmed. Thx!

[CharonY]

Still don't see it. Does it have to be allowed for experts independently?

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

Oops. Yes, it does. Should work now.

[CharonY]

Yup it does. Thx.

[imatfaal]

 

9 minutes ago, CharonY said:

Yup it does. Thx.

Panorama shots work rather well don't they

[StringJunky]

29 minutes ago, imatfaal said:

 

Panorama shots work rather well don't they

I resized mine in Faststone Image Viewer to fit... crushed the vertical axis rather than cropped it  without keeping the aspect ratio.

Edited July 28, 2017 by StringJunky

[CharonY]

47 minutes ago, imatfaal said:

 

Panorama shots work rather well don't they

Yupp. Unfortunately I did not have some of my better panoramas here that I could resize, but that works fine. More regular-sized photos require a fair bit of cropping, it seems. I do dig yours, btw.

Edited July 28, 2017 by CharonY

[imatfaal]

33 minutes ago, CharonY said:

Yupp. Unfortunately I did not have some of my better panoramas here that I could resize, but that works fine. More regular-sized photos require a fair bit of cropping, it seems. I do dig yours, btw.

I used to spend hours cropping, warping, and matching to make panoramas.  Now I find that if I take a few pictures with my Android phone Google makes a panorama automatically and asks me if I would like to keep it (and it is really well done).  The Barf panorama is an oldish one - using one of the microsoft tools which took much of the graft out of the job.  It is quite amusing when you realise you are attempting to upload a hundred MB picture to be a cover shot - fired up gimp and lost 399 out of every 400 pixels and it still looks good

[CharonY]

Well, for online viewing a phone is certainly good enough and far more convenient. After all, monitor resolution is not that high.  I have made some largish prints (not that one I uploaded, of course) and for that a tripod/gimbal and Hugin (because I spent too much money on cameras/tripods...) were  quite necessary. 

But in the uploaded one I also only used a cheap compact camera (which likely has worse sensor that today's cell phones) but with a tripod to do multiple exposures, as the sun was just too bright.

Edited July 28, 2017 by CharonY

[imatfaal]

It has all got a bit silly with resolution - my phone takes 3840x2160 with 1 stop exposure bracketing - giving a grand total of 25megapixels captured every time I hit the button. 

[CharonY]

Well, that is a tad silly (though likely due to the 4k wave), as the sensor size would be fairly limiting and arguably produce better results with a larger pixel pitch (wouldn't it be 2x 8 Mpix, though?). Another thing to consider is that I guess that exposure bracketing in phones is done via exposure time (and maybe iso) as most lack a proper aperture (i.e. you essentially have a fixed aperture, wide-angle lens), which may not always work. But then the brackets may be necessary to deal with the reduced dynamic range. After all the image quality has improved massively. 

[imatfaal]

8.3Mpix for normal shot + 8.3Mpix one stop below + 8.3 one stop above.  And the phone has variable shutter speed and of course a pseudo ISO - if iso is set to auto I think it changes both, if manually set it changes just speed.  The bracketing is nice for HDR compositing.  To be honest most of the time I use the bog standard app which came with the phone - but you do get nicer results with thrid party apps which let you play with settings ie opencamera

[CharonY]

Ah, gotcha. Good thing is also that they toned down the tone mapping from HDR as in the first gen the standard settings often generated clown vomit. Much of the advances are surprisingly not quantum leaps in the sensor technology, but rather software trickery. The downside is that they may create artifacts that show up in larger prints. On the other, other hand many also provide raws now (though they normally still have at least some level of denoising and sharpening, from what I understand.

 

Edited July 29, 2017 by CharonY