Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Darjeeling Himalayan Railway panorama

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[edit] Darjeeling Himalayan Railway panorama

The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway is a narrow guage railway system in Darjeeling, that has been identified as a world heritage site by the UNESCO. Climbing over 2000m in a distance of 86km from Siliguri, the system was hailed as an engineering marvel when it opened in 1881.
The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway is a narrow guage railway system in Darjeeling, that has been identified as a world heritage site by the UNESCO. Climbing over 2000m in a distance of 86km from Siliguri, the system was hailed as an engineering marvel when it opened in 1881.
Reason
A unique image where both the diesel and coal fired engines of the DHR is visible in the loco shed and the view of the historic Darjeeling railway station.
Articles this image appears in
Darjeeling Himalayan Railway
Creator
user:Planemad
  • Support as nominator — PlaneMad|YakYak 17:43, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
  • Reluctant Oppose It's a great scene but the leftmost stitch has left half a woman who reappears further to the left... people appearing twice in one panorama is unavoidable but it's a pity that this one was caught right on the stitch. I take it there were no shots that could be used to patch her out? ~ Veledan • Talk 17:59, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
  • oppose blown highlights and over sharpening. Debivort 18:02, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

Comment ive removed the ghost lady and another guy who was walking down the tracks. Also fixed the highlights. Can you please be specific on the sharpening. I havent sharpened it -- PlaneMad|YakYak 18:37, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

  • Support. Very nice, and good to see a picture from a less covered region of the globe. First of all not many areas of the pic are actually blown, just two patches of overcast sky, which is hardly avoidable. The clods on the left edge are well exposed. Secondly I know from experience how hard it is to get good stich of an unforgivingly straight subject such as train tracks, especially as some are faily close to the camera. In the thumbnail the image looks pretty tilted, but at full size it's not that bad. Maybe this could be straightened even more. As for the oversharpening... ...it is no oversharpening but results from how the camera lens is corrected for spherical aberration, most compact cams are tuned to produces an accutance increase, which looks like sharpening. --Dschwen 18:43, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
    • I also like that there is a lot going on in the picture. The only criticism I have is the vertical composition. The image could have used some more room on the top edge. --Dschwen 18:45, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
      • Odd, I feel like we are looking at different images. One of the most glaring examples of what I had seen as oversharpening is the edge of the man standing by the train number 122A - it has the characteristic dark line next to a light line. So, that's due to some lens engineering? As for highlights, my analysis in photoshop shows lots of FFFFF pixels in the roof on the right side of the image, the rocks, and the people near them. These white pixels are 1% of the image by area. Debivort 18:55, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
        • I overwrote the original, so you may have to clear your cache. Ive fixed the blown highlights on the left part. There are a few highlights on the rights side which can be reduced the same way, which i will do tomorrow (its night here in India). This was a 7 image stitch which i took in quite a hurry when i found a pause in the heavy traffic on the highway. Ive tried to expand it vertically as much as possible using a lot of cloning to fill in the missing details -- PlaneMad|YakYak 19:21, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
  • Oppose I'm seeing the same oversharpening and blown areas as Debivort in both images. The second is better, but it just doesn't fix the problem. However, I'm getting .36 % pure white pixels in the oldd version and .27 % in the new one, so I can't imagine that the blown part is as irredeemable as Debivort's 1 % suggests. I'm could be wrong though in my quick measurement. J Are you green? 22:00, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
  • FWIW, the way I calculated it was to select all FFFFFF pixels, with no antialias, fill them to black, fill the rest to white, average the image, and then read the RGB value of the resulting light gray field. I got RGB=254 254 254 and HSB = 0 0 99%. Maybe there's a more elegant way. Debivort 23:47, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
  • You are probably right. I'm messing in an area that I don't know enough about. I just went to the luminosity histogram and put the total pixels with level 255 and put that number over 10.72 million. J Are you green? 03:49, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
  • 1/255 is about 0.392%. You method has way less precission than the histogram method, and due to rounding the white pixel count could be as low as 0.196% but not higher than 0.588% and certainly not 1% of the image by area. So if you must do pixel-counting, please do it right. --Dschwen 10:45, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
d'oh I subtracted from 256! I wonder why the HSB value was 99% though. Hmm. In either case, a lot of white pixels. Debivort 13:31, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
  • Oppose, All the above votes address technical quibbles, but I just don't see what the big deal is with the subject. It's a rail shed, there's nothing really distinctive about it, and it's just all distorted off to the sides with nothing really important in the middle. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 03:43, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
  • Support Now that the half-a-woman has been fixed! This is a great scene, and a good stitch job. Night, you have the right not to be wowed but for my part I think it doesn't need to be a featured subject to be worthy of featuring as a picture. I think it's really compelling. And Per Dschwen, we have little enough coverage of India in FP ~ Veledan • Talk 07:13, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
  • Image updated I have removed the highlight problem (hopefully). As for the oversharepening bit, ive fixed the part that was mentioned. I never sharpened the image, so i dont know how it got oversharpened. Night Gyr, your right that the pic is not stuning to bring you to your knees, but the scene thats been captured is very unique. What do you think would have been the best way to capture the DHR? Trains are difficult subjects to capture, which is why you have so few (or none?) featured pictures of them -- PlaneMad|YakYak 13:37, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
  • Oppose - I have a lot of reservations about the usefulness of this kind of image. What would you do with it? It's not beautiful to look at. It's not especially informative, as what you're mostly seeing is the people and trains etc that were there at that particular moment. And the composition is very loose - what are we looking at? People? A train? A train station? A train line? There's no real focus to it. Also, the closeness of the photographer to the people makes the shot seem very voyeuristic, like the viewer is really right there on the platform - but why? That might be good in a photo about a cultural event, a festival or something, but for a photo about a train line? I think the above discussion has become very fixated on fixing the technical deficiencies without thinking about the broader picture of "is this a beautiful, useful, encyclopaedic photo that is valuable to Wikipedia"? I just don't think it is. A super-wide, super-narrow panorama isn't a great way to capture that subject for us. Stevage 04:15, 7 July 2007 (UTC)
  • Oppose Two sun streaks in the middle of the church-like structure on the hill and there is also some missing pixels from stitching on the very top and some by the concrete blocks on the bottom right. --Digon3 14:45, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

Not promoted MER-C 03:32, 12 July 2007 (UTC)