Hot answers tagged color-correction
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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 ...
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Color Management is a scientific process by which various devices used in an image processing workflow can be used despite differences in their supported color. Every device is only approximating some of the total range of colors humans can see, and this limited range is called its "color gamut". Each device has limitations, but those limitations differ from ...
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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 ...
17
That comes down to color temperature of the ambient light. Flash always has something similar to daylight (5500-6500K), so you need to use conversion gels from daylight.
Most useful gel is CTO (color temperature orange), which will color daylight to tungsten (3200K). Usage is as follows:Stick CTO gel on flashSet color temperature to tungstenShoot
This has ...
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I cannot give an exhaustive answer for everything you could improve, but I think you have a problem I am frequently noticing in my own images: oversaturation. This is especially well visible in the third image - in my experience, dead reed does not have such a rich golden hue, especially on a cloudy winter day.
Oversaturation happens frequently, because a) ...
11
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 ...
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I'm surprised no one has suggested the most important thing you can do to improve that picture: Take the photo when the light is better. Let's say that row of houses faces east. There's going to be a window of time in the morning where the low angle of the sun is going to cast a nice warm light on that facade while at the same time the sky behind it is ...
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The trick here is that the scene was lit with a single incandescent (hot) lightsource. The sun is also an incandescent lightsource, just shifted a bit in the spectrum.
This means it's really easy to make the bonfire shot look like daylight, as all the frequencies are present, just shifted. All I did was load the RAW into Adobe's RAW converter and drop the ...
7
The amount of processing is always a matter of personal taste, you can see some people to prefer almost straight-from-the-camera images, while others apply significant contrast changes to achieve their typical look.
So the matter of post-processing is always a matter of your personal taste (and of course how much do you want to go with what people around ...
7
I would think that a lab's color-correcting quality is dependent upon the lab and the skill of the technicians. There probably is not a single, globally correct answer here, as every lab will use different equipment and have different people with different levels of skill. That said, when it comes to color correction for print, taking the paper into account ...
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Those patches are used for printer/press calibration. The grey scale is used to control the exposure, contrast and dot bleed of the separations (each of the greys should be visible and distinct; the white should be paper-white and the black should be solid) and the colour patches should result in each plate showing only the colours it's supposed to show. The ...
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IT is enough to add a cooling filter (25% Cooling Filter (80) in Photoshop) to the image and increase a little the contrast and saturation (10% or so). Do not overdo it or the result will be unrealistic.
You could use a polarizing filter for a darker sky. always shoot in raw to be able to change the white balance later. If unsure of the details you whant to ...
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Perspective and settings - like Darkcat Studio said.
Direction of the light - in the second background, the side of the tree branches facing the camera near the couple are in shadow while the couple is lit from the front - you have to choose a background that has the same light direction has the foreground picture.
Quality of the light - hard light vs. soft ...
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The interesting thing here is that's not a colour cast, the hue values are messed up. It's not just that all the colours have been pushed toward purple, which can happen for certain white balance settings, what's actually happened is that all colours are shifted round the colour wheel, blue/cyan -> purple, orange/brown -> green.
Here's the right hand part ...
5
One thing to consider when you have this kind of flat lighting and subdued colors is to go grayscale. Taking color out of the equation means you have the ability to control the contrast to enhance the textures and mood of the image without worrying about distorting the colors and worrying about the snow being too blue or yellow.
Or, if you want to keep the ...
5
Yes, the camera has "presets" that are applied to the image to give it some more contrast, saturation, etc. It's very common for people to want to switch back to JPEG because RAW images look flat when you start out. It's important to still use RAW though, because you can add in your artistic vision a lot more effectively with more sensor data.
To answer ...
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In the most basic sense, yes. The colour temperature of the LEDs is well within the range of normal daylight, and just about any camera can cope with that.
The problem is that it's highly unlikely that the LEDs you are planning to use have a good colour rendering index (CRI). All of the consumer LEDs I have seen have a CRI in the low 80s at best. That means ...
4
As far as I know, you need a gray card for exposure measurement and white balance correction.
If you are only interested in custom white balance, you may use a white piece of paper that is lit under the same condition as your subject. Sometimes, you may even use a thin piece of paper (white toilet paper) you put on your lens and take a picture you will ...
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According to this documentation, "Bibble 5 Lite offers sRGB and ProPhotoRGB (the working space), while Bibble 5 Pro offers a broad selection of color profiles." It's under Additional Image Settings in the output settings for the queue.
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If your photos were taken under different lighting conditions, it is unlikely you will be able to fully normalize all of them relative to each other. Lighting is a very critical aspect of photography, and changing it will indeed change the color balance of your photos. You may have some leeway to correct and improve similarity, however it is doubtful that ...
4
Depending on the extent of the bleached areas, you may find that something like Alien Skin's Image Doctor can do the trick without spending a huge amount of time on the cleanup. You can test-drive a limited-time trial of the software to make up your mind (click on "Demo" in the menu) before committing to any expense. My experience is that good plug-ins tend ...
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It would really depend on what UV filter you used. Not all UV filters are created equal, and even ones that are supposedly "high-end" might not function correctly, while some cheaper ones function quite well.
The ultimate goal of a UV filter is to filter out ultraviolet light, which starts around 380nm, and progresses on down to as small as 100nm or so. A ...
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The ones I am familiar with are more established companies rather then fly by night shops that just setup a website one day and shut down the next. They also are mainly setup for professional studios that burn through many shoots a year, and are looking to outsource some of the "tedious" work we all know as photography :)
Shoot Dot Edit and Lavalu are the ...
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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 ...
4
This is an interesting question and I am glad you addressed the part about people having different setups
The "common denominator" as you call it for me would be sRGB ICC and this article Titled A Standard Default Color Space for the Internet: sRGB backs that theory up.
Use sRGB in your workflow and you should cover most bases
Hope this helps
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I'm surprised nobody mentioned a polarizing filter. That can do wonders on a blue sky, depending on the angle from the sun.
Think about what sky light actually is. It's light from the sun getting scattered from small particles in the atmosphere. Those are going to be largely dielectric, so will be polarized over a range of angles. The light from any one ...
4
There are several things you can do to that picture. It would be best of course to have the raw files. Then you should be able to make reasonable adjustments but still use the full dynamic range and resolution of the output format. I used my own software for this, but these are all ordinary operations any photo post-processing software should be able to ...
4
Color cast is a difference between what you see in the image and what you expected to see.
That occurs because the camera records light always in a fixed way but the human brain does not. Our brain interprets colors with the knowledge of what it should be. This is why we see a white wall under yellowish light as white. Only the camera measures this and sees ...
3
I don't know an automatic way to adjust colors in Gimp, buy you can do it manually with curves. Open the good image, use color picker to see the colors you want to match (activate its info window).
For example, I noticed that in the good image:
chair purple is approximately R=140, G=110, B=140
leaves are approximately R=110, G=150, B=110
And in the bad ...
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