The lights do make a difference if they are cfls cycling at 60 hertz (correct my number if I am wrong, someone). This would effect the light fall off of the bulbs in a crazy way when four are different distances from the wall, and consequently the camera. The light is much weaker from the furthest bulb, and with a flickering, can create a very interesting lighting situation that will effect localized exposure fluctuations from shot to shot, and play havoc on different color channels, especially the yellow green, RIGHT where you are having this problem

it is muddy light , blue light from indirect sunlight casting down on warm , yellow woods , mixed with daylight from a flash and from either tungsten warm yellow lights in the fixture or worse CFLs with their terrible CRI values. And All of it showing up on the ceiling

I took the file into Photoshop and cleaned it up after rendering it in NX and turning off the D-lighting and setting the Picture Control to D2x Mode2 and reducing the saturation a bit and then a setting of 20 on the Shadow Protection slider

then in CS3 i used an adjustment layer on the ceiling a Hue / Saturation adjustment to the Yellows and hit the + on the dropper and moved it around on the ceiling and then reduced the saturation -20 and it is really fine and neutral now with little evidence of the issues

this is not really something any camera can render this mixed light is a bugger , you should have seen what film would have done here to get a real look at Bad

J

emreese wrote:
patrickphoto wrote:
this is in response to the RAW file I recieved from the OP.

This is definatley posturizing. if it were truely banding, then some amount of noise added in PS would minimize the effect. It doesn't.

Unless this issue comes up in IDENTICALLY the same pattern image after image, then it is not the camera being "malfunctioning".

Test different color lights, and see if you can isolate the channel that is weakest here.

OH: are these lights CFL's?

The lights dont make a difference and I dont know what they are.

Oh boy the lights make a HUGE difference..........

yup. exactly as jmcfadden says.

jmcfadden wrote:
emreese wrote:
patrickphoto wrote:
this is in response to the RAW file I recieved from the OP.

This is definatley posturizing. if it were truely banding, then some amount of noise added in PS would minimize the effect. It doesn't.

Unless this issue comes up in IDENTICALLY the same pattern image after image, then it is not the camera being "malfunctioning".

Test different color lights, and see if you can isolate the channel that is weakest here.

OH: are these lights CFL's?

The lights dont make a difference and I dont know what they are.

Oh boy the lights make a HUGE difference..........

I didnt mean the lighting doesnt make a difference, of course it does. I meant that it did not make a difference if the fixture lights were on or off relative to the color bands. These are incandescant lamps not CFL's.

Trying to do HDR in his lighting is even tougher

emreese wrote:
I didnt mean the lighting doesnt make a difference, of course it does. I meant that it did not make a difference if the fixture lights were on or off relative to the color bands. These are incandescant lamps not CFL's.

Trying to do HDR in his lighting is even tougher




then you just have to "fix" it in post. it isn't real bad i have dealt with much worse

it took me just a few minutes to deal with it

jmcfadden wrote:
emreese wrote:
I didnt mean the lighting doesnt make a difference, of course it does. I meant that it did not make a difference if the fixture lights were on or off relative to the color bands. These are incandescant lamps not CFL's.

Trying to do HDR in his lighting is even tougher




then you just have to "fix" it in post. it isn't real bad i have dealt with much worse

it took me just a few minutes to deal with it

Thank all of you for the tutorial.

emreese wrote:

I tried duplicating this in another environment with no incandescant lighting just the flash with the same results.

John said that he had to turn off active d-lighting in NX. I'd suggest turning it off in the camera and trying it again, in the duplicate environment you mention above. I'm guessing that you're on the ragged edge for ADL and the underexposures are causing color loss, which leads to posterization with any relatively aggressive post processing.

What does the histogram look like?

My 14-24 does the same thing when I take sunset photos directly into the sun at 24mm. My 24-70 does not at 24mm.

Figure that one out... ;\

Eric,

I think your focus is in the wrong place here. This is not a camera related issue. You are creating this minor posterization problem with your lighting. It's pretty common with mixed light settings and can be addressed by improving your lighting technic. With the shot already taken, you can make enough of an improvement by reducing the general contrast and then adding it back via large radius USM.

There are several larger issues with your lighting and staging of this shot. I'm not sure this is the right forum to go into those.

kasakato wrote:
What does the histogram look like?

Looks like this!

Elan II wrote:
Eric,

I think your focus is in the wrong place here. This is not a camera related issue. You are creating this minor posterization problem with your lighting. It's pretty common with mixed light settings and can be addressed by improving your lighting technic. With the shot already taken, you can make enough of an improvement by reducing the general contrast and then adding it back via large radius USM.

There are several larger issues with your lighting and staging of this shot. I'm not sure this is the right forum to go into those.




I would love to carry the discussion further about the lighting and comp. This was a quick and dirty photo shoot with the flash on the camera.

I am assuming the focus point would have been better at the fruit basket and stopped down more to get more DOF.

I shoot this kind of location stuff all the time and never had posterization like this. Mind you I don't mix flash and tungsten as WB gets really nasty to deal with. CFL's generally resort in greenish cast and are a major pain to correct in post.

It looks to me though that the ceiling fixture has nothing to do with your issue and they look to me like tungsten bulbs not CFL's, colour and size of bulb. The posterization is emanating from a point on the ceiling out of the shot, towards the camera.

I'd do some test shots in a similar environment using every thing you used to get this shot, then eliminate the flash and work back so you have something to pin point the problem.

For starters turn off D-lighting. I've never seen it work well enough to use it in camera and it can create a tonne of issues.

emreese wrote:
I would love to carry the discussion further about the lighting and comp. This was a quick and dirty photo shoot with the flash on the camera.

I am assuming the focus point would have been better at the fruit basket and stopped down more to get more DOF.


If you don't mind waiting until this evening, I'll come back and give you a detailed critique. Also, to clarify, I meant your focus on the camera side of the issue instead of the lighting, not the focus of the camera itself. Poor choice of words on my part considering where this is posted.

Elan II wrote:
emreese wrote:
I would love to carry the discussion further about the lighting and comp. This was a quick and dirty photo shoot with the flash on the camera.

I am assuming the focus point would have been better at the fruit basket and stopped down more to get more DOF.


If you don't mind waiting until this evening, I'll come back and give you a detailed critique. Also, to clarify, I meant your focus on the camera side of the issue instead of the lighting, not the focus of the camera itself. Poor choice of words on my part considering where this is posted.



I will check back later, look forward to your comments.

It looks like good old posterization to me. The subtle tonal transitions are occuring on each color channel, and since the different channels posterize at different places in the image, there are slight color shifts at the tonal jumps. By cranking up the saturation, you've just exacerbated these slight color shifts.

Posterization is just the nature of digital. It's much worse and much more visible in digital if you underexpose and then lighten in post. It's one of the reaons people use "Expose To The Right (ETTR)" techniques. Posterization is also worse if you reduce the number of bits per channel, as in 8-bit JPEGs. Also, if you aren't already doing so, try going to 14-bit RAW. Having more bits per channel helps minimize or eliminate posterization, or allows you to underexpose more and still recover without suffering posterization. JPEGs, being 8-bits per channel files, are going to be more susceptible to posterization.

Okay, sorry to take so long. Let me start at the beginning here: the lighting.

When shooting architectural interiors, the two sources of light you have to deal with are the ambient and your fill. The ambient breaks down into natural and artificial. The fill can be direct, diffused, bounced, diffused and bounced, and on the negative side, reflected. I think good architectural photographers strive for the most natural look they can achieve while maintaining quality, which in the ideal setting would meant that the viewer cannot tell that fill was used at all. That's the main goal of architectural interior photography. There are a few others. I'll describe those as they relate to your shot.

The main flaw with your shot is that you allowed the fill to dominate. It gives the room an unnatural look, you have some obvious hot zones on the forward ceiling and on the left wall. Your windows look dim and dull. You can see through the windows all the way to the other side of the street, which is distracting and taking away from the room itself. The chandelier lamps look excessively ember. The chandelier is also casting a major shadow on the back wall. You have posteriztion at the boundary between the fill and the ambient. These are all a result of a single issue, your lighting technic.

To address all of these, you need to allow the ambient light to dominate the scene. It's a bit of a problem since you're working with a single light, which is less than ideal. But it can still be done. You start with your flash off and set the exposure to blow the windows out by a half to a full stop. Next, identify your dark spots and address them with limited, soft light. This technic will give you a cheerful, bright look. The chandelier lamps will brighten, too. Shadows will be more balanced and diffused. The view from the window will be obscured by the brightness. The posteriztion will go away since the boundaries between the ambient and the fill will be more gradual and graceful. In this particular setting, I would have first attempted to bounce the flash from the upper corner of the right wall, about one third of the way from the rear/right corner. But you have to experiment to get it right.


Other issues with this image:

You are close to having plumb and level lines, but close doesn't cut it. Your camera should have been tilted down just a tad. Since it's not always possible to get the lines perfect via a viewfinder though, using a PS plug-in like Image Align Pro can correct the ones that got away.

Your staging is mostly well done. The chairs are properly aligned. The runner and basket on the table are centered. The rug is not skewed. Detail that was missed is having all the shades drawn to the same level, rolling up and tucking away the shade cords and wrinkles in the table runner. If it was me, I would also rotate the deer at the rear window 4-5" counter clockwise, for a better angle.

My last niggle is things that are there, belong there, but without which the shot just looks better. For instance, I always clone out A/C grills and smoke alarms. In this shot, the lone electrical outlet on the left wall is better removed than left.

One common issue I don't see in your shot is reflections. You controlled those well.


I'm pretty sure I covered the basics. If I remember something else, I'll add it in another reply.

Elan II wrote:
I'm pretty sure I covered the basics. If I remember something else, I'll add it in another reply.

That's all well and good, but that's not what he's asking. He's asking what's causing the banding in the ceiling.