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Mulling Around Kintyre

by Paul Gallagher

There is a link to the previous feature in that across the 16 miles of sea from Antrim, the rocks resurface and run seamlessly along the length of the Kintyre peninsula. Seamlessly, though, is a misnomer, the geology around these parts is as complex as any in Scotland. Indeed Arran, on the left of the headline image is made up of rocks from more than eight periods of continent building and volcanic activity compiled as the rocks formed hundreds of millions of years apart and the donor super-continents wandered about the surface of the globe. It was finally completed 65 million years ago as America tootled off to open the Atlantic and a resulting volcano burst forth to form the Goat Fell complex. Kintyre itself is less complicated, most of it being compiled during the Cambrian mountain building phase when the super-continents of Avalonia and Laurentia collided. Even so, the club foot at the southern end of the peninsula is different and separated by a granite dyke which runs across from sea to sea between Campbeltown and the airport. The area is small, for 50% of that distance is occupied by the airfield's runway! The rock seam which runs across to Antrim is the north-western side of the Highland Boundary Fault. To the north-west are the Dalradian, Grampian Highland group while to the south-west the rocks are part of the Midland Valley group. Arran is in the middle of this and contains a mix of 400-million-year-old Old Red Sandstone, 260-million-year-old New Red Sandstone, with a huge intrusion of granite in the middle - it is little wonder that the scenery is so varied and spectacular!

Kilbrannan Sound

This image was shot from the beach at Skipness looking south-south-west down the sound; Arran is to the left, the Kintyre peninsula to the right. The image was shot on a Nikon D800E using a 24mm PCE lens at f13 for 61 seconds' exposure. Camera filtration was a Big Stopper along with a Lee 0.9 Grad filter to control the sky. The Big Stopper induces a blue cast and Paul took a reference shot without the filter to obtain a marker for colour balance. Accordingly the blue was dialled out with a change from 5750°K to 6950°K. Other adjustments were made to control a small level of highlight and shadow clipping.

Now this feature was started to answer a question about sharpening images from D800s, which have more than 7,000 pixels of width to play with.

Claims have been made about the new sharpening engine in Photoshop CC and so this too needed exploration. We usually follow the workflow of the PixelGenius group in one form or another - that is to pre-sharpen a Raw file (or 'capture' sharpen as they call it) followed by an inkjet-specific sharpen ahead of printing (usually to around 20x16-inch size). The inkjetspecific sharpening is the PixelGenius variant of High Pass sharpening,

allied to both sharpening and adjusting the actual High Pass layer to control

the sharpening zones. We have an automatic 12-image ring around to quickly explore settings. This immediately threw up a conundrum for we normally see little difference in D800 images between the various levels of sharpening but this time around we did. Eventually we started afresh and adjusted the settings starting with Radius at 0.6 pixels, Detail at 90, the Amount set to 60 and finally an adjustment of the Masking level (using the Alt button) until the water was protected from pre-sharpening and ending up at 50. This was then followed by a modest 30% opacity setting of the High Pass layer.

This combination created the best visual compromise of sharpened features with slightly enhanced edges (haloes!) at the sea/sky and land/sky junctions, as shown (at 200% as a screen grab). This was then followed by making a 20x16-inch print that was deemed acceptable. A frustrating thing about all this is that it might not work on the next image, making 20x16 test images is time consuming and costly and, finally, there is no way to show our readers exactly what we are talking about! Once again, though, the point that was hammered home was that the screen is a poor witness to how a print is going to look; you have to make prints eventually!

Geology for Newbies

Arran is often described as containing the geology of Scotland on one island. The view below is from Kintyre, close to Skipness looking at the length of the island. The complexity of the rocks is illustrated by the fact that the Dalradian rock (hatched line) was made over the South Pole, the Devonian (red) is deposited desert sand from around the equator, the New Red Sandstone (yellow) was created at 25° N and then the volcanic stuff followed much later as America moved away to open up the Atlantic. The range of timescales is breathtaking, many hundreds of millions of years for the sandstones to deposit but sometimes as little as five days for the volcanic dykes to intrude and fill. Between the other rocks and the volcanic stuff the dinosaurs were wandering about the planet.

Adobe CC Smart Sharpen

Much has been made of the new sharpening features of Adobe Photoshop CC. Having watched the promotional video twice we were no nearer to understanding whether it was better or worse; a 6-inch, moving screen view is no way to make even the roughest assessment of sharpening. In any case the hype was more obsessed with correcting camera shake (we're pros for goodness sake, we don't have camera shake :\)) ). On a parallel video by an Adobe product manager, the presenter was whizzing the sliders about in a highly unconvincing manner while making the right sorts of noises - at no stage was making a print mentioned!

Our next port of call was Martin Evening's book Photoshop CC for Photographers. Martin has been (and to some extent still is) sceptical about Smart Sharpening and he too found the turgid response of the method to be irritating. Smart Sharpen certainly grinds pixels!

For our part, we set up a triple screen view, one with our legacy ring around on the maximum acceptable levels, one for Smart sharpening and the original. We found the Smart Sharpen to be reasonably easy to adjust, ie it was quite insensitive. We could not quite reproduce the legacy effect; in most cases the Smart Sharpen was delivering enhanced highlights we would have preferred left untouched (even with the Tonal Width slider at 100%). Because we were using a 'Smart Filter', we had the option of fading the effect back and it also allowed us the use of opacity filters and layer masks. Overall, though, we failed to convince ourselves that the method had any advantages. There is an obvious lack of advice on settings even for a start and such are the options you could invest a lot of time with little to show for it. Nevertheless it did get the job done although it was slow.

Scale Down

This was one of the questions originally posed: 'How should D800 landscapes be sharpened and scaled down for small-size web use?' Until now we have employed the methods provided by either Juza (www.juzaphoto.com) or Philip Perold (www.philipperold.com). The rider to the question was whether the scaling from the larger D800 image required any additional steps in the incremental scaling these methods employ. Both methods use incremental scaling twice with inter-stage sharpening. Perold goes much further with luminosity masks and Find Edge moves, indeed his code runs to 49 pages and 2,165 lines. Despite this, the action was completed in 6 seconds on a D800 image. His final flourish is to enhance the saturation and add a little glow to overcome the loss of sparkle brought on by the downscaling.

We found this to provide an attractive finish to a 720 pixel image for the web and the method is certainly worth more exploration.

Getting There

One reason the Mull of Kintyre is so quiet is that the journey is very long even though the scenery is amazing. Paul Gallagher gets around this by driving to Ardrossan (to the south of Glasgow in Ayrshire) and then hopping to Arran, then to Kintyre. In total this saves about 100 miles of narrow roads but has the advantage of your arriving at your destination by boat, always a magical experience. The Calmac Hopscotch ticket is about £60 for a car and passenger, depending upon season, number of passengers, etc, so it won't break the bank!



Updated 27/04/2026 16:44:22 Last Modified: Monday, 27 April 2026