Problem with red color

Hi, I find that it's difficult to have accurate reproduction of the color of red objects with digital camera (I'm now using Nikon D300). Could anybody suggest the possible reasons.

Thanks!

You have a very good camera in your hand. In fact, one of the best in exposure control among the Nikon line of DSLR's. Check your white balance setting and look out for specular reflections when you compose your shot. We could probably help you if you can post a sample of your "problematic" shot.

Red can be a very difficult colour to shoot, especially in strong ambient light, such as flower shots. It must be something to do with the colour physics and all that business, of which I am blissfully ignorant. When I do have problems with it, the red seem very blotched and loses all it's detail. Very annoying. Trying to modify it with saturation and luminosity in the red colour channel doesn't seem to work.

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Originally Posted by kaytltam

Hi, I find that it's difficult to have accurate reproduction of the color of red objects with digital camera (I'm now using Nikon D300). Could anybody suggest the possible reasons.

Thanks!

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Possibly diffraction. If your camera is f8 diffraction limited, maybe it is only f7.1 RED diffraction limited.

I think there is a tutorial about it.

Possibly also to do with metering. Metering is often green biased and might allow the red channel to get overexposed.
The Bayer array has double the number of green sensor areas as the red and blue areas, so that might mess things up. Check the histogram to find out.

Thank you JonathanC. But why the same problem isn't so obvious with blue objects?

Thank you arith. May be I should experiment with different aperture sizes.

Generally it's simply a case of over-exposure; Normally cameras won't activate the highlight clipping alert if only 1 channel is blown -- so one often is unaware of the fact that one has a clipped channel unles one has a camera with seperate RGB histograms.

I'd suggest simply under-exposing such shots and see if your results improve.

Couple of things here...

Are you shooting raw or jpeg?

What in camera picture profile are you using?

What are you processing your images with?

So all the above do factor in even if shooting raw but only if you're using Nikon software to manage your raw files. Jpegs mostly honour your in camera settings are hardwired in with a little latitude to fix some errors.

Use ViewNX2 and/or NX2 to process NEF files the in camera picture control remains in play. So, if you have a vivid setting or any picture control where saturation has been increased expect to see wild colours, especially the reds. Here perhaps try a neutral pic control and process from there.

If you use any other conversion software like PS, Lightroom etc then all bar the WB settings will be discarded. What happens in LR you can assign the nothing is changed upon import or you can assign a profile like Adobe Standard etc. These all have an impact on the file like colour, contrast, black depth etc.

Suggestion - try setting your camera to neutral, shoot raw(NEF) and put it into your favoured software but use a neutral setting there too. See what the files look like and if you always make the same adjustments, contrast +/-, saturation +/- consider making a preset that applies those settings on import. You may also find that setting everything to neutral at the start works.