Devil is in the the details

30. August 2015 · Comments Off on Devil is in the the details · Categories: Fall Colors, Locations, Taking care, Travel · Tags: , ,
detail, fixing the brightness

ADHD makes details difficult, luckily meds make a huge difference !  Never the less, the devil is in the details 🙂   Several things have been reminding me of this lately; some post processing work I have been doing, and planning the Columbia gorge trip with others.

The featured image of the Canadian Rockies  was originally to dark and the clouds were blown out.  I had it on my home page after fixing the too dark, but the clouds still bothered me because they were blown out -one of those details I had not taken care of….. This in turn had me looking at other photos from that trip (honeymoon) and finding more.  One of the other details that I found was halo’ing on the sky-mountain edges.  This in turn required me to revisit several other photos to deal with the halos.  In the photo below, notice the halo in the sky along the mountain top.

detail, fixing the brightness

Canadian Rockies

fixing the sky and halos

 

At least for me, it takes time and practice to notice the details, (and usually a goof or two as well). The fall colors to the Columbia gorge looks like it is a go, and I was talking with some of the others about it. In the course of the conversation, lots of details started popping up that need to be thought about.

  • rain cover for the camera
  • wool socks because our feet are likely to get wet, and wet cotton is awful
  • towel for rain, mist (from sky or water fall)
  • alarm clock to make it to sunrise on time
  • battery charger
  • which rental car agency so that we can have 2 drivers per car
  • AAA maps
  • which flights
  • where to stay for Silver Falls State park

And the lists go on.  But if there is a list, I am more likely to get taken care of than thinking of it, and then forgetting.

The grizzly below does not have a catch light in its eyes. Compare the difference in feel between the image without the catch light and the one with the catch light. The catch light is a small detail, but has a big impact.

After Lightroom

Waking grizzly

 

detail with catch light

Waking grizzly with catch light doesn’t seem as formidable as without; a warmer friendlier photo.

Color Balance

29. April 2015 · Comments Off on Color Balance · Categories: Fall Colors · Tags:
Color balance corrected for shade

“The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts” by Marcus Aurelius

I was talking with my cousin at the family Easter get together, and he wanted to know about color balance.  There are a number of related topics that really needed to covered so as not give a mechanistic answer  for color balance including:

  • Color space
  • How the eye sees color
  • Color correction
  • Color profiles

What is color balance?  I’m sure that you have seen an interior shot where everything is yellow orange and not what it appears to the eye?  Or even worse, it is this awful green tint.  incandescent lighting produces light that is very orange yellow in color, while florescent lighting produces that green tint light. The eye sees the light as white in both cases, but it is not.  Similarly clouds and shade tend to produce blueish tinted light. The photo below was taken in shadow, color correcting leads to the image above.   Balancing color is the process of converting the tinted light to an an un-tinted light.

Where does color space come into this? sRGB  is typically the color space of the web, but it is much smaller than other color spaces, and this becomes important if you want to print photos. Here is a link to comparative color spaces.  It is easy to reduce color by moving to a smaller color space, but it is difficult to make up what should be the color in going to a larger color space.  The reasons for shooting in sRGB would be it is quicker for post processing, or it will only go to the web.  If those are not your reasons, ask yourself, why am I shooting in such a restrictive color space.

What are color profiles? There are two types of answers:

  • First, if you have ever tried to print a photo on your own printer, you know how hard it is to get the image to print correctly.
  • Second, color profiles are set of color characteristics that map a device’s color to a standard color model (typically LAB).  So, you can have a profile for your camera, screen, printer, or anything else that works with color images.  All the color profiles map the device to a norm, so that it is always the same red, blue, yellow that is used across devices.  This is what allows printers to match the screen.

For more information on color, Luminous-Landscape has a number of good articles in its Understanding Series, including the eye and color.

As shot color balance

As shot color balance