On 6/10/2011 5:45 PM, Jim Nichols wrote:
> The combination of late afternoon sun and the camera's color rendition
> changed the color slightly. She is probably correct.
Jim, you've been doing a great job lately of avoiding blown highlights in red
and yellow flowers.
What's happened here to make the color go wrong isn't the sun, at least not
primarily so, nor the camera's inherent
rendition. Actually, this is a great example for teaching. :-)
It's obvious at first glance that there is something 'off', esp. in the
flowers. Seems like the colors are lacking snap,
contrast is low, 'something'. If you look closer at the flowers, esp. at the
larger size, there are large areas that are
all just one color, very unnatural for flowers. Then I hear apparently the
color is off.
That's all from clipping in one channel, in this case, the most common one for
flowers, red. Take a look at the
histogram.
<http://www.moosemystic.net/Gallery/Others/Nichols/Mothers_Day_Basket_5_Wks_Later.htm>
The overall histogram doesn't look too bad, and that can fool you. The red
channel is heavily clipped. That means many
pixels have the same value, 255, for red, while green and blue are normal. What
that does is make the red highlights
less red than they should be, both relative to less bright reds and relative to
the rest of the image.
It also loses tonal differences in the red highlights, so that the natural
variations can turn, as here, into one,
undifferentiated color.
As a side note, the same thing can affect shadows, giving them a color cast
that isn't in the subject. Here, the shadows
may be a little less blue than is accurate. But most people don't notice that;
can you imagine Siddiq suggesting that
the shadows are off in this image? It looks fine to me, too. We're looking at
the flowers, anyway.
Moose
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