well done....all i dont support murderism, its ur choice. :).. I lyk da angle u took da picture at, makes it look interesting. lol, wen u gav me the link i it was realli gud, i didnt kno u took it, i was surprised. but well done, ur a great photographer. :):):)

The thing is it is difficult to ignore the grain! Such a shame, as this is a great idea, well composed and a great shot otherwise! I suggest the following? Take the picture at a higher resolution (higher than 1600:1200 if you can). Crop, don't copy or cut and paste. Save as a PNG not a JPEG. In this way you will keep the detail much better. PM me if you want to talk about this further - I have learned the hard way!

I didn't even notice the grain/noise until I read the description and comments! The main object is interesting enough to keep eyes away from the background!

Anyway, to reduce noise there are special tools available, but you can also get good results with a simple selective gaussian blur effect. Also use a mask to keep the effect only on the background. In this case this should be very easy to do because of the good contrast between the main object and background.

Yes that's so. But isn't it better to prevent it in the first place?

The noise in this image isn't a JPEG compression artefact and has nothing to do with JPEG. It comes from using high ISO mode for shooting in low light conditions. To prevent this kind of noise one should shoot in the lowest ISO sensitivity mode permitted by the given light. For example my compact has ISO 50, 100, 200 and 400. At 50 there's very little noise while 200 and 400 are useless for "wallpaper" photography.

But I agree, one should shoot at the highest resolution possible (and later downsize to 1600x1200) and save intermediate results in a lossless format such as TIFF.

Interesting information you've generated here, isaacp!!! Learning all the time no matter where I go on here...that was some good advice up there. I first met this in the voting booth so I didn't have your remarks to take into account when I voted on it. I voted for the composition mainly because I like this sort of minimalistic approach. What I noticed was that the clarity in the pic seemed to me to miss the subject and focused more on the foreground and the very front portion of the bowl, when, in fact, in my humble opinion, the subject to be focused on would have been better served and more interesting to see if the contents were our main concern. Take it for what it's worth and....

Cheers !!!!!!! Happy New Year

:)PJ

Interesting. I would have liked the chopsticks to have been more in focus too. The concept and composition are really good. The soup looks delicious too! I hope you enjoyed it! I like the counter top. It looks like mine.