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Help needed with editing

Started by hevans, September 04, 2009, 10:13:02 PM

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hevans

Ok, went to a welding (wedding to the rest of you lot) yesterday as a guest (don't need the extra stress in life of taking real photos there) and used the wife's Lumix a bit (with some success, see here and here :)). I was trying to get the welding bouquet and other assorted evidence of the nuptuals, but I'm having a bit of difficulty getting a good colour saturation :doh:. The reds seem just too cruddy. :(

Any help/advice is greatly appreciated.

You can find the full sized photo here on my flickr site.

Thanks,
Hugh

oRGie

Will try and get a bit of time to fiddle with the shot Hugh, but I just opened it in cs3 and opened the exposure dialogue and with the white point dropper adjusted it, that straight away made a difference to the reds and greens vibrance and of course made the white linen whiter but not washed out :)

Eileen

Reds are a known problem area for digital sensors, and the particular dark blue/black reds in these roses are more than usually difficult in my experience. I have butted my head against this problem for some time. I've posted in a link to what I found. At the end is some guidance on how to edit files containing very strong reds. It assumes you have shot the picture in raw or can open it in raw, but the general principles could be applied in other editors.

http://eileenrafferty.blogspot.com/2009/03/any-colour-as-long-as-its-red.html

Malcolm1938

#3


This was a quick fix in PhotoFiltre Studio. Full sized version available to send you by email if you want it- Will delete this from my gallery when I know you've seen it
Malcolm

6/9/2009
Picture removed from my gallery - No longer visible here....

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hssutton

#4
Quote from: Eileen on September 05, 2009, 09:15:49 AM
Reds are a known problem area for digital sensors, and the particular dark blue/black reds in these roses are more than usually difficult in my experience. I have butted my head against this problem for some time. I've posted in a link to what I found. At the end is some guidance on how to edit files containing very strong reds. It assumes you have shot the picture in raw or can open it in raw, but the general principles could be applied in other editors.

http://eileenrafferty.blogspot.com/2009/03/any-colour-as-long-as-its-red.html


As Eileen says, reds are very difficult for most digicams. I usually correct the reds from my canon raw files in lightroom, which makes an excellent job of it. Much more difficult when the image is a jpg.

Here's my quick attempt in CS4

Harry

Hinfrance

#5
Here's my quick go:



Serif Photoplus X3 and five minutes. Looks a bit too red to me, but just for demo purposes.

As Harry said, fixing the WB with a jpg is not much fun  :D
Howard  My CC Gallery
My Flickr
The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil. H.L Mencken.

hevans

Hi Guys,

I really appreciate the help with this. Alas, there is no raw file, it was taken with the wife's Lumix (point and shoot - I left the nikon at home).

I can see you're hitting the same problem as I - the reds just don't seem to be right. I think Eileen's blog pretty much hits the nail on the head.

Thanks,
Hugh

Jonathan

Yeah what Eileen said - reds can be tricky.  Some cameras are better with reds than others.  The more recent Nikons are miles better than the old ones (and I suspect that's true of all makes).

Assuming these are Grand Prix roses (yeah I want nerd points for that) then Harry's pretty close.  A small lift to the brightness and maybe a tweak to the blacks and you're good enough for web.  The loose petals appear to be cathing a different light (or maybe the face of the petal really is a different colour from the edge) so you may want to edit those separately.
It's Guest's round

hevans

Quote from: Jonathan on September 05, 2009, 10:01:45 PM
Yeah what Eileen said - reds can be tricky.  Some cameras are better with reds than others.  The more recent Nikons are miles better than the old ones (and I suspect that's true of all makes).

Assuming these are Grand Prix roses (yeah I want nerd points for that) then Harry's pretty close.  A small lift to the brightness and maybe a tweak to the blacks and you're good enough for web.  The loose petals appear to be cathing a different light (or maybe the face of the petal really is a different colour from the edge) so you may want to edit those separately.

You also get points for noticing the difference in the loose petals, they were silk ones.

Thanks for the advice, I'll give it a go.

Ta.
Hugh

Chris P

Quote from: Tringle WP on September 05, 2009, 04:51:06 PM
As Harry said, fixing the WB with a jpg is not much fun  :D

You can open the jpeg image into ACR and adjust the WB from there.  It's not as good as with a RAW file but it works

Hinfrance

#10
The problem we third party 'editors'  have is that we don't know what colour the roses actually were. I made them the same colour as the ones in our vase, but the comments above suggest that they may be the ones that are more burgundy in colour.

As for adjusting the WB, yep ACR or LR will work on a jpg, but not as well as Bibble does. ;) Photoplus has temperature and tint sliders (but no eye dropper) for jpg WB adjustment.

Later: I have just read Eileen's blog and it is very helpful. There is one bit I am not in accord with. Adobe RGB is notorious for producing dull reds. I'd go so far as to say that the poor results in reds more than offset the small gains in the green and yellow gamut over and above sRGB. I appreciate that defying the current wisdom is contentious, but there you go.

It was mainly because of the dull reds that I switched from using ARGB to SRGB some time ago. I have not regretted it.
Howard  My CC Gallery
My Flickr
The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil. H.L Mencken.

hevans

#11
Hi Guys,

Thank you very much for all the advice and comments. Next time I'll take the D300 and hopefully have a raw file to deal with.

In the mean time, this is the final outcome of my editing battles with this shot. Any additional criticisms that would help improve it are most welcome.



Ta.
Hugh

Jonathan

Nice.  Can't find the full size so I can't say too much.

Editing on the flowers looks OK.

Pen looks a bit weird - did you sharpen it or something?  I'd have moved it off the title of the book.  Or maybe opened the book.

Shadow of wineglass isn't great.

Um, what else did you shoot?
It's Guest's round

hevans

Thanks J.

I think I over mucked about with the wine glass shadows, didn't really do anything to the pen. I've fixed the link to the larger version now.

This was a quick re-arrange of the various items while they were free and a quick couple of snaps with the point and shoot. Didn't even think about opening the book, not really done many still life shots. There were a couple of other shots, but it was more some basic bracketing to get the exposure and not oversaturate the reds.

I'd be interested to see some examples from others of what to do with these sorts of items. In particular when it comes to laying out the items.

The only other shots of the day are the two new B&Ws in my gallery http://cameracraniums.com/gallery/displayimage.php?album=lastup&cat=10005&pos=2.

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