Info Royal Barge Anantanagaraj of Thailand. It's from full dress rehearsal with crew in their genuine, bright red costume. I won't miss the next real event - best guess would be 4 years from now celebrating King's 7th cycle.
Too bad the sharpness is all I could do. The crop is only the top and bottom of the photo, the way how Royal Barge photos are often presented. I decided to keep the full width (full 3,888 pixels) from the camera rather than scale them down to 2,000 pixels or something wide. --Lerdsuwa10:32, 25 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
By the way, none of the rower red costume are overexposed. The overexposed part is the golden barge. No matter how I tweak to pixel value to somewhere below 255, it always returns back to 255 after saving to JPEG format. It's just the way JPEG compression works in the area with lots of details. (I have DSP knowledge and understand how it works). Another way would be saving the image as PNG and I could make the image having zero overexposed pixel. --Lerdsuwa10:32, 25 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Done Fix sharpness and overexposure. I thought I would have to rewrite parts of a JPEG library to solve compression-induced overexposure but tweaking JPEG quantization table is much easier. Now the fullsize photo only has 16 pixels with value 255 on GIMP, down from 49937 pixels (should be about the same on other viewer). --Lerdsuwa15:56, 25 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Question The red still looks strangely flat, and it sometimes has auras next to it. While the latter could be from lack of focus, the flatness seems to be due to oversaturation/overexposure in the red channel, as mentioned above. When you say "Fix sharpness and overexposure.", did you go back to the original raw file? If you worked from a jpeg, it's no use - in jpg, colors blown once are blown forever... --JDrewes17:27, 26 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I could go back to original JPEG and redo them. I doubt it would change anything. The costume is made from wool felt and has those smooth look. I did avoid overblown during shooting of the photo which cause the original to look somewhat dark and lack the color and intended to fix it during post processing. You can look and judge from the oldest version of this file. It only had some white balance fix and curve correction but didn't correct for saturation. I applied saturation after seeing how other photographers image looks. Image:Narai_Song_Suban_HM_Rama_IX_bow.jpg shows greater details on the costume to see how it looks like but the focus was on the figure on the barge, not the crew. (Note: from different barge, slightly different costume, notably the silver decoration on the hat and sleeves rather than gold/red.) --Lerdsuwa12:29, 27 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Just experiment with the original again while checking each step not to overblowing the cloth. The result actually look flatter, the version I uploaded above is more 3D because of the higher sharpening. --Lerdsuwa16:10, 27 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]