Queens Park - Colour vs B&W

[asnow]

Here are couple of version of Queens Park (the Ontario Government Legislature). The colour one is the more traditional (perhaps touristy version) and the same picture converted to B&W.

Which do you prefer?

[asnow]

Marko. The originals were 271Kb and have been converted to less than 50Kb when posted and seem to have lost a lot of sharpness. Does your new server still have a limit of 275Kb.

[Marko]

There are a few issues that still need correcting and this is one of them...arggh.
All the settings that I see and set are at 275k....and yet it's not working as expected.
I have a call out to someone about this and expect it will be fixed in a few days.
Until then...calling the images from flickr or photobucket works fine.
So sorry for this hassle - I'm trying to solve multiple problems at the same time these days.

[asnow]

I did another post and it was 251K and did not get reduced so I guess I will post a little smaller until this is resolved.

[DanStar]

I prefer the color image.

[Mad Aussie]

Ignoring the sharpness issue ... I think I lean towards the colour version due to the B&W not having enough punch about it.

[asnow]

Thanks Dan and MA. Here's one more crack at it with smaller files (which I hope won't get over compressed) and adding a bit more punch to the B&W

[Mad Aussie]

Huge difference in sharpness!!!

More contrast in that B&W now too ... much more appealing.

[Iguanasan]

I much prefer the colour one here but I almost always prefer colour. :)

[asnow]

Thanks MA and Iggy. Weird, the B&W one looks much better in Lightroom than it shows after being exported and posted. The colour one seems to be much closer to the way it looks in Lightroom.

[theantiquetiger]

Asnow,

I have never edited anyone's image before and I saw that you do not mind.

I took the original color and desaturated it (forget to which), and than moved the curves to get kind of a dark image. Than I dodged the building and the hedges in the foreground and increased the sharpness a little. I am no expert, you are probably a lot better than me at post editing, but this is what I came up with, more of a haunting, dark castle image

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6120/6336512610_f81181abbb_b.jpg

[asnow]

No problem editing my pictures. I'm open to any suggestions. I kinda like the haunted castle idea. It sorta fits being the provincial legislature and housing all those scarey politicians.

[Marko]

I made a change that may have helped this compression situation....and I'm seeing no compression anymore with images that are less than 275k and less than 1025 pixels in width.

Anyone still seeing errors?

Thx! Marko