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Archive 2016 · Help, this file is a mess 5DSr

  
 
dgdg
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p.2 #1 · p.2 #1 · Help, this file is a mess 5DSr


Especially for black subjects, it only takes a little light to make the IQ poor.
Examples -

Early sunset
http://davidsphotography.zenfolio.com/img/s6/v138/p499813159-5.jpg


Late sunset
Much more hair detail.
http://davidsphotography.zenfolio.com/img/s/v-2/p291678019-5.jpg

Better yet. Cloudy day, ready to rain.
Without the soft diffused light, the fur would have been full of glare.
http://davidsphotography.zenfolio.com/img/s6/v134/p1465995772-5.jpg



Feb 22, 2016 at 09:00 AM
Bruce n Philly
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p.2 #2 · p.2 #2 · Help, this file is a mess 5DSr


This is great stuff all. Thanx so much.

Peter, I am always amazed at what Capture 1 can pull out. Thanx for your posts and insights.

Others, I suspected it was the light on a black subject.... odd that this golden, low light works so well with other birds. However I still have some questions.

Questions:

1 - Why was shooting +1 bad? I thought you should always expose to the right if you can especially if your subject is dark and runs the risk of missing detail or exposing noise should you lighten it. What am I missing here?

2 - Does shooting at +1 have detrimental effects on the image (assuming I don't blow out parts)? Wouldn't you end up be in a better place by adjusting -1 in software later given that you capture "more information"?

3 - How do I pull out that red wing detail using LR? I suspect LR can do it..... even on my super-fast machine, LR renders the pic in a jerky way such that I see detail in there as it renders/pops to full color or whatever and its gone.

4 - No one took the bait about camera profiles. Any insight here and why making my own with Color Checker left an over saturated blob of red on the wing?

Thanx again all, great learning going on.

Peace
Bruce in Philly



Feb 22, 2016 at 10:04 AM
Bernie
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p.2 #3 · p.2 #3 · Help, this file is a mess 5DSr


1 & 2 (indirectly) There is a problem with exposing to the right.

a) your display on the camera is small and you might not see the small portion that is blown, or close to it -- in this case the red channel.
b) your histogram is probably showing overall tonality and not what a particular color channel is doing
c) your camera is probably displaying the histogram to the jpeg image at whatever WB the camera decided on and not what the raw captured. There are some complicated ways of dealing with this. I just set my camera permanently to daylight so that the histogram gives me the closest rendition to what I captured in raw very simply.

2) (more directly) Try taking a picture of a sunset at +1 and see how successful your are at pulling out the colors.

In ACR this is the histogram of the entire scene, first in Prophoto color space as I adjusted it and then in sRGB. You can see the tails are going to give you trouble.

Prophoto
https://bernardwerner.smugmug.com/Miscellaneous/i-4967Cfk/0/O/Screen%20Shot%202016-02-22%20at%2010.32.38%20AM%20Prophoto.png


sRGB
https://bernardwerner.smugmug.com/Miscellaneous/i-BZrZQsj/0/O/Screen%20Shot%202016-02-22%20at%2010.33.19%20AM%20sRGB.png



Feb 22, 2016 at 10:55 AM
dgdg
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p.2 #4 · p.2 #4 · Help, this file is a mess 5DSr


Awesome Bernie.


Feb 22, 2016 at 11:15 AM
Peter Figen
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p.2 #5 · p.2 #5 · Help, this file is a mess 5DSr


The "blown" portion of the posted histogram is insignificant and not even in the same luminance area of the red-orange patch on the bird. Remember that the histogram is simply a graph of the distribution of pixels within the image.


Feb 22, 2016 at 11:54 AM
Imagemaster
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p.2 #6 · p.2 #6 · Help, this file is a mess 5DSr


Detail on all prints may be important to pixel-peepers, but it not always that important to the general population. I have sold 30x40 canvas prints that have very little detail. They were purchased because the buyers loved the subject matter, composition, or colors, etc., not because of any detail.

The same can be said about paintings. Look at many of the most famous and expensive paintings in art galleries around the world. Some have great detail as the artist used very fine brushes, while others just used broad brushes. Different strokes for different folks.

As for shooting in harsh light, that is where a polarizing filter can help reduce reflections from glossy feathers and reveal more detail.



Feb 22, 2016 at 12:06 PM
Bernie
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p.2 #7 · p.2 #7 · Help, this file is a mess 5DSr


Peter Figen wrote:
The "blown" portion of the posted histogram is insignificant and not even in the same luminance area of the red-orange patch on the bird. Remember that the histogram is simply a graph of the distribution of pixels within the image.


Peter, if you look at the original unprocessed raw, the wing is blown in sRGB colorspace. Prophoto still lets you work with it, but that doesn't mean you might not run into issues trying to get detail in both ends of the image.

https://bernardwerner.smugmug.com/Miscellaneous/i-Dkvv4pF/0/O/Screen%20Shot%202016-02-22%20at%2012.24.45%20PM%20sRGB.png

Tony, I agree with you completely when it comes to final product. Image impact is paramount and many times detail gets in the way. Sometimes we even shoot b&w because color takes away from the story....

However, I believe the OP wanted to know how to shoot this and still keep detail in both ends of the histogram.

One way I tell if color or at least texture (for b&w) can be salvaged is to see if either exist when I move the slider to -5. If it's gray or no texture, that helps decide what if anything I'm going to do with the shot. As you can see in this there's plenty of color and texture. The problem is how to mine it.

https://bernardwerner.smugmug.com/Miscellaneous/i-hmmhcP7/0/O/Screen%20Shot%202016-02-22%20at%2012.42.51%20PM%20-5.png

As I mentioned earlier, sometimes it may be easier to process the raw twice, once for the blacks and then the reds and blend the two.



Feb 22, 2016 at 12:34 PM
Imagemaster
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p.2 #8 · p.2 #8 · Help, this file is a mess 5DSr


Bernie wrote:
As I mentioned earlier, sometimes it may be easier to process the raw twice, once for the blacks and then the reds and blend the two.


Which is why I don't understand why with today's cameras more people don't use auto-bracketing when the subject is not moving. They can then work with layers of 3 different exposures to control highlights and shadows, or simply clone from one image to the other.



Feb 22, 2016 at 01:16 PM
Peter Figen
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p.2 #9 · p.2 #9 · Help, this file is a mess 5DSr


Adobe's default preview is at least a stop brighter than Capture One's. That has been a problem for some time, but nevertheless, here's a screenshot with histograms and Info Palette readings from the lightest part of the red patch after the raw file has been process directly into sRGB.









Feb 22, 2016 at 01:29 PM
Peter Figen
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p.2 #10 · p.2 #10 · Help, this file is a mess 5DSr


Now, here are two sRGB jpegs processed directly from the raw file into sRGB, one from ACR and the second from Capture One. Both of them show usable detail even in sRGB. Capture One has far more robust controls for color than ACR, and that accounts for the contrast and saturation there, but the point here is to show that detail *can* be had going straight into sRGB from multiple converters. Could I tweak the colors from the ACR version to be better? Sure, but that's not the point here.





ACR Raw directly to sRGB







C1 Raw directly to sRGB




Feb 22, 2016 at 01:34 PM
Bernie
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p.2 #11 · p.2 #11 · Help, this file is a mess 5DSr


Peter Figen wrote:
Adobe's default preview is at least a stop brighter than Capture One's. That has been a problem for some time, but nevertheless, here's a screenshot with histograms and Info Palette readings from the lightest part of the red patch after the raw file has been process directly into sRGB.



It appears we are looking at some of the improvements in ACR from CS6 (ACR 9.1.1) to CC 2015. Finally, there might be a reason to jump into the cloud....



Feb 22, 2016 at 02:10 PM
alexdi
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p.2 #12 · p.2 #12 · Help, this file is a mess 5DSr


I don't see how this image could be corrected. The dynamic range is enormous and most of the tones are at opposite ends of the scale. You're trying to move these extremes to the middle, which is a pretty radical and very non-linear compression. There's no way it'll ever look natural. I'm with the others-- try again when it's overcast.


Feb 22, 2016 at 04:21 PM
Alan321
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p.2 #13 · p.2 #13 · Help, this file is a mess 5DSr


Change your WB to better reveal the red.

The main problems, in my opinion, are:
1. imperfect focus (Just a tad too far away) and/or too little DOF.
2. shutter speed too slow (so easy to get subject motion blur).
3. almost too much DR for the camera to capture. Not quite, but close enough to push the bright reds and the dark blacks into the relatively compressed extremes of the histogram where details are easily lost. You probably lost some DR capacity by using ISO 800.
4. Picking a lower WB than "daylight" reveals richer reds.

You probably should have tried exposure bracketing. Hindsight is so wonderful, isn't it ? However, having never seen one of these birds I don't know exactly what it should look like.

- Alan



Feb 22, 2016 at 05:28 PM
Eyeball
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p.2 #14 · p.2 #14 · Help, this file is a mess 5DSr


Peter and Alan are on track here.

There are no blown/clipped pixels in your raw file. If you are reproducing the image in a small color space like sRGB though, it will take some work to compress the wide dynamic range into the small color space. There are a whole range of techniques to do this at both the global and local levels.

One thing to keep an eye on in this situation, however, is how your post-processing software of choice impacts hue when bringing colors into small color gamuts. Different software can "twist" the hues differently in these conditions.

At least in this thread so far no one has said that "reds tend to clip", which is largely a myth propagated in the past by people who don't understand color profiles.

Here is another thread on this topic from some time back that you might find interesting, also involving a bird with saturated color:

https://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1294830

Also, here is my shot on you image. This was with ACR and PS CS6. There is a lot of aesthetic judgement involved with things like color temperature, contrast, and sharpening so I am in no way saying this is the best that can be achieved. My main point is that there IS detail in the red area without question and it is possible to show that detail even in sRGB. With a wide-gamut monitor or high-quality inkjet printer, it would reproduce even better and easier.

http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/12145446/RWBB.jpg



Feb 22, 2016 at 05:56 PM
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