Crit my photo sourced textures.

Fwap

Hey peeps,

Got a camera ages ago in the hopes of sourcing my own photos for textures, only made do on that recently.

Wouldn't mind if yall had a gander at some and tell me how I'm going.

I'm using a Samsung NX300

Pretty big file size's so i'll just be linking to imageshack.
Don't have a lot at the moment either so probably not a whole lot to look at atm, but hey if they are good, free shit for you guys

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First thing i notice is the lens distortion clean up gives some bad artifacts around the outside of the image.

Quack!

You have a ton of image grain here. This usually is a result of really high ISO. Drop the camera into manual mode and set the ISO to the lowest, which is 100 for your camera. That will clean up the images significantly. Depending on the lighting condition though, this may require you to be VERY steady and maybe even use a tripod.

EarthQuake

I'm only seeing noise in the last image really, but I agree, you should alwaysshoot at base ISO, which is 100 on that camera, for this sort of stuff. Base ISO will give you the least noise, and most color depth an dynamic range with any camera. You should also shoot in raw, and process the files yourself in Lightroom or similar so you can control the noise reduction and sharpening yourself, the NR looks a bit heavy here which is killing some of the detail.

Make sure to stop the lens down to F5.6-F8 or so to improve sharpness, reduce aberrations and ensure your defpth of feild is deep enough. I would recommend getting a sharp prime lens as well, like the 20mm, 30mm, or 45mm Samsung lenses, depending on which focal length you prefer. The kit lens that comes with the camera isn't very good and is going to have more distortion and other aberrations than a quality prime lens.

Use a tripod as well, when you're stopping down and shooting at base ISO, you'll likely not have enough light to shoot handheld.

Fwap

Thanks for the advice guys, i set the ISO back and set the lens down to F5.6-F8 as you guys recommended, also bust out the tripod.

Just took some photos in the back yard, but i think the shutter speed was my downfall because almost all of the shots where just too white washed to use.
Is it safe to assume the shutter speed is situational and no common settings are going to help?

It was pretty bright out today as well.

The only texture i was marginally able to save - concrete.

Sorry not much to go on, was a bit bright out and i'm lazy.

edit - went back at a better time of day, i think im understanding the shutter speed concept, i have a little thing on my cameras interface that indicates -3 - 0 - +3 and if i adjust the shutter speed it will move towards a certain number. So i assume to line it up with the 0?
Also same texture as above with the use of what i learnt.
concrete take 2