How can I make the sky in this photo more vibrant?

Question

I spent an evening walking around and shooting with my relatively new Nikon D7000 and I ended up not liking most any of the photos I took..

Let's take this one for example:

The sky was blue and vibrant when I took this shot. Why did it come out so dull?

I was shooting with aperture priority and ISO 1000 and 1600 that evening. What are some things I could have done to make this photo more vibrant?

Asked by Sonic Soul

Answer

Some post processing is needed for some images, and most images benefit from some post processing.

When you take an image like this, where most of it is blue, the automatic white balance will be fooled into thinking that the image should be much less blue. If you had used the "daylight" setting for white balance, it would have been a lot closer to the actual colors.

I wan't there, so I don't know how it should really look, and it's also up to each photographer to create their own experience of the siuation, but here is an example of what you can do with it:

Temperature: -31
Tint: +14
Exposure: -1.05
Fill light: 5
Blacks: 2
Brightness: -1
Contrast: -6
Clarity: +10
Vibrance: +10

Answered by Guffa

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What are the RGB values that correctly represent a 5800 K white surface on a calibrated 6500 K monitor?

Question

Consider a high-quality monitor calibrated at the standard parameters: 6500 K, 2.2 gamma, 120 cd/m^2. Calibration is accomplished with a LaCie hardware sensor + its software, and it's quite accurate.

I intend to take a picture of the Sun through a telescope, using a safe, dedicated solar filter (full aperture Baader solar film for telescopes). The Sun's temperature is 5800 K. The filter is "white", quite decent actually, but I'm sure it's spectrum is not 100% flat - rigorously speaking it cannot be. Also, the camera may capture some infrared and so on, and further alter the color of the solar surface.

I want to process the resulting image so that, on the calibrated 6500 K monitor, the Sun's color is represented as close to original as possible. I expect the result to look like a soft creamy white.

Basically, that boils down to representing a 5800 K "white" on a 6500 K monitor. How do I do that?

I could load the image and tweak the tint settings (white balance) in software until the RGB triads on the solar disk fall in the required range, but I don't know what that range is. Sounds like there should be a formula for it somewhere ("given T1 the temperature of the monitor, then T2 white is represented when xR + yG = zB" or something like that, I'm just making stuff up).

Another approach: it would be nice if there was an app that could just generate "white" at any temperature, given that the monitor is calibrated at a certain color temperature. Then I could compare the generated white with the Sun's image, and make adjustments. But I'm now aware of any such app.

Any suggestions?

I do most of my raw file processing in Lightroom, I can use GIMP for additional color channel tricks. I'm not a photography expert, obviously, but I can follow directions. :)

Thanks!

Asked by Florin Andrei

Answer

The answer is: sRGB = (255, 241, 234).

The details of the calculation:

I calculated the spectrum of a blackbody at 5800 K using the Planck’s formula, then multiplied by the CIE color-matching functions of the standard 2 degrees observer and integrated over the wavelengths to get the (X, Y, Z) color. I then divided by X+Y+Z to get the chromaticity:

(x, y) = (0.3260, 0.3354)

multiplying (x, y, 1-x-y) by the XYZ to sRGB matrix, and dividing by the greatest component (R) yields:

(R, G, B) = (1, 0.8794, 0.8267)

I then gamma-encoded, multiplied by 255 and rounded to the nearest integer and got:

(R’, G’, B’) = (255, 241, 234)

Caveat: My answer is in the sRGB color space, which is almost, but not quite 6500 K with 2.2 gamma. BTW, “6500 K with 2.2 gamma” is not a color space specification: you also need the chromaticities of the primaries to get a fully-specified color space.

Answered by Edgar Bonet

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What is the best free software to edit NEF photos?

Question

I'm new to photography and just starting to take photo in RAW format. I haven't found a difference in quality of color adjustment editing between ViewNX (free software coming with my Nikon d5100) and Picasa, perhaps because of my inattentiveness. So I've decided to ask here what is the best free software to get most from RAW (Nikon NEF) photo editing?

Asked by yura

Answer

For the Mac, the best editor that will get the most (but is not exactly easy to use) is the Raw Photo Pro processor. It can do pretty much anything to maximize the raw potential. But if I may, I think that's going down the wrong path. You can get a little extra quality from processing the raw differently (I'm intentionally excluding post-raw conversion editing) but far more quality from how you setup the shot. Change in lighting, filters, angle, exposure, etc. can dramatically improve a picture more than subtle raw conversion improvements.

Even still, once a photo has been converted there is a world of changes you can do to an image that has far more ability to change perceived quality than what is done through raw conversion.

Answered by nwcs

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What is colour correction, and how does it work?

Question

As I've recently picked up photography as a hobby, I've been reading more and more about it online. A term I come across is "Colour Correction." But what does this mean for my photos? I've never seen anything about it on the options of the camera.

Is this some sort of treatment done afterwards? How does it enhance my photos and how do I use it?

Asked by Simon Sheehan

Answer

Color (or colour) correction is a broad topic. But generally is it trying to get the most accurate colors out of an image.

The basic problem at hand is that your eye automatically color corrects everything you see. A piece of paper looks just as white inside under a lamp as it does outside in the sun. However the two lighting conditions are really very different. When a camera captures images of that same sheet of paper under the same circumstances, you will see that the inside light is most likely orange, and the outside is white or blue.

Your camera will generally do an okay job correcting for this fact, by applying a white balance (the specific color white should be under any given type of light). But sometimes it is wrong or slightly off. Additionally, A photographer may choose to tweak the color of lighting for artistic reasons, or because of a mixed lighting that doesn't match.

There are a variety of ways to accomplish this in photoshop, lightroom, and even in your camera. If you have the option, shoot in RAW for the most flexibility.

Answered by cadmium

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How do I make picture from my Canon 550D more dramatic and colourful, via camera settings if possible?

Question

I have just started clicking with my new Canon 550D DSLR camera and while I'm getting used to its functions and settings, I was intending to get the colours more vibrant while clicking my pictures. Any suggestions on camera settings to improve this picture's colour tone before clicking? If not, could anyone please suggest me the best way to do this via post processing in Lightroom? (I have used exposure settings trying to get the picture right)

Answer

Let's see... When you took the picture, you thought you were looking at something like this:

...and were disappointed to find that what the camera captured was dark, flat and greyish rather than an enhancement of what you saw.

There are two problems with that picture. The first is the difference in brightness between the sky and foreground, which is forcing the earth-bound scene to be rendered a bit too dark. The second is that the colour temperature is too high for your white balance setting (the light is much bluer than your camera is expecting), so the predominant red and yellow tones of the foreground building are desaturated (greyish).

There isn't a lot you can do about the brightness range at capture time. When there is a better, straighter line of demarcation between the bright and dark (as in a landscape with a clear horizon), you can use a split/graduated neutral density filter to darken the bright area selectively, but that isn't practical for this particular picture. It's something that needs to be fixed in post (unless you're shooting JPEGs, in which case your camera may have a setting to bring up the lower midtones and lighter darks).

The second is a matter of getting the right white balance. The presets in the camera only cover a very few common conditions, and "auto" sort of depends on your subject matter being a lot like what the camera expects the "average" picture to look like. A custom white balance using a grey card can help a lot. So can an enhancing filter, which can boost the red end of the spectrum without really affecting the blues much.

I didn't spend a lot of time on the image -- the object of the game was to try to emulate what you saw with the naked eye rather than to make the image "pop". Even at that, though, it took a few tools to get to this point. (I used Photoshop along with Topaz Labs' Adjust 5 and ReMask 3.2 because I have them, but they're hardly the only game in town.) The foreground was processed separately (on a different layer) from the sky, water and the distant shoreline. Both layers had a light enhancement of local contrast and had the exposure adjustments needed to get that part of the image right. I then masked the sky out of the foreground image, allowing the adjusted sky to show through. Unlike a typical overall HDR effect, this masking technique doesn't result in obvious halos.

It may sound like a lot of work, but the "HDR" (local contrast enhancement) part of the job was done using single-click presets, and the masking job doesn't have to be anything like perfect. It's not like I was replacing the background -- I just didn't want the sky to have the same adjustments as the foreground. Total time? Less than two minutes. It wouldn't have taken much longer to make it really pop, but it's your picture, so you get to make the decisions.

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How can I evaluate the colour accuracy of my photos?

Question

I have noticed that the colours in my photos are quite dependant on the medium on which I am viewing them — the camera LCD, computer monitor, TV, digital photo frame and print. So, something that looks good on the camera LCD may end up looking quite different on print or even on a monitor, the range can vary quite a bit across the media. Is there any way to better judge the colour accuracy of a photo? Shooting RAW over JPEG should make a difference, I suppose.

Also, along these lines, since the premium lenses are supposed to have better colour reproduction, such a tool\method could also be used to evaluate lenses.

Answer

If there's nothing in the picture which provides known, measured reference colors, this is very hard after the fact.

If your image does include reference colors, you can sample them and measure how different they are from the standard. Xrite sells the somewhat-traditional Gretag Macbeth targets, or you can buy more affordable calibration targets produced by Wolf Faust. These targets have a wide range of different colors, because adjusting balance to get reddish-browns more accurate may come at the expense of greenish-blues (for example.)

Even if the image isn't displayed accurately on your monitor, you can use the reference data provided with the color samples to calculate the deviation from ideal for the different colors, as Imaging Resource does in their tests. One would use software like Imatest or DxO Analyzer to do this evaluation. I'm aware of plenty of various other software (including free/open source options) for building device profiles from a reference, but I'm not sure of anything else that gives an analysis of error from ideal.

If you color-calibrate your monitor and use an entirely color-managed workflow, you can be more confidant that the image you see with your eyes represents reality as well.

You may also be interested in evaluating your own ability to judge differences between colors — if you have a high degree of color acuity, you may be more confident in trusting your perceptions (assuming a color-calibrated monitor — or a monitor or print that is the final output), perhaps compared to actually looking at the real scene. There are, of course, serious tests used by eye doctors, but I also recently learned (from here) about a neat online test that you might want to try: the FM 100 Hue Test.

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Why are the red light and its hood in my image colored different than they were in reality?

Question

I took this image in a train station with shutter speed 1/8 second and AV mode, the aperture was chosen to be 4.5. The problem in the colors of the spotlight in the right corner of the image. In the image, the light is white and the border (the hood) is red — however in reality, the light was red and the hood was black. Why this change in color?

I'm using Canon Rebel T3i with its EF-S 18-55 IS II lens. I'm using Adobe RBG color space.

Answer

The reason is that the red light is a light source, therefore it's much brighter than any other parts of the scene. The pixels showing it are overblown - meaning there was more light coming than your camera sensor could capture. The light is not pure red, it emits enough green and blue light to blow these color channels of pixels too.

The hood is just reflecting light from it. It was hard to see with a naked eye, because the light beneath it was much stronger and the hood seemed perfectly black compared to it. In photo, however, the intensity of captured light is capped by your camera sensor's dynamic range, and you can see the subtle reflection next to overblown pixels.

Unfortunately, overexposed pixels cannot be restored in post processing.

To capture a similar scene with correctly exposed light source, you should take a second frame with exposure reduced to a level where the light source is exposed correctly, and then either create an HDR image or simply use layer masking in Photoshop/Gimp/etc to select which parts of image should come from which frame.

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Should I have my lab color correct my images?

Question

The labs that I deal with to get my images printed offer the option to color correct my images prior to printing. One example of what they do is:

Per file color correction is available. We color correct the entire file for balanced skin tones without causing blown out or color casted highlights.

Is it a good idea to have them do this? When is or isn't it a good idea? Am I taking away my creative abilities or am I giving the images a 2nd opinion before printing? Do you find that they only correct skin tones, what if I have a landscape image? Experiences would be appreciated.

I am not talking about this kind of online color correction: Which online color correction services give good results?

Answer

Letting the lab do color correcting (assuming its a good lab that does good job with color correction) is like using the auto mode on your camera - the lab will make sure everything comes out ok and correct the obvious mistakes but you will lose creative control.

This will help with family photographs edited on non-color-profiled screen but probably a bad idea for fine art, pros or any picture with anything special (deliberate under or over exposing, extreme color effects or even an unedited photo of a subject with unusual colors)

Edit: dpollitt's comments got me thinking - if your output is only prints (not digital files) it makes perfect sense to outsource the tedious and thankless job of color correction to the lab - especially if you are a pro and you can earn more money when taking pictures then when color correcting them.

but:

1. If your output is digital files + prints you have to do the color correction yourself anyway fro the digital version so there's no point in letting the lab do it.

2. If you want consistency and repeatability (that is, be able to re-print the image and get exactly the same printed image) then you can't let the lab do it - you can't be sure you will get the same technician and that the technician will make the same choices if you reprint months or years from now.

3. If the picture is not a standard "well exposed" middle-of-the-road image then you can't let the lab co color correction because they don't know what you want to picture to look like (and this will probably completely throw off any automatic correction they might use ).

So - if you are a pro (as in get paid for taking photos), you're main product is prints and you don't sell or care about digital versions (point 1) and you don't care about reprints (point 2) and you take boring pictures (point 3) then you should absolutely let the lab color correct your pictures.

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