What to look for when editing the WB and colours of red or pink flowers

Christina, The reds are not "blown" as in R>254. The first red poppy image has a lot of greens clipped to zero. The second, with the darkened background, has a lot of blues clipped to zero. In both images the color certainly 'pops' but, in nature, even red poppies have a spectral reflectivity that includes some greens and blues in daylight. So, whenever we see a flower color that has R or G or B at zero, we should suspect the worst, I reckon ;-)

Sorry!

Hi Ted,

Thank you for letting me know. For some reason I was under the impression that it did not matter if the blue or greens were clipped in a red flower, and assumed it would be similar for a pink one. Hence I concentrated on just getting the red part of the histogram as well as I could. But I could see something was not quite right, so thank you.

So it seems that it is quite challenging to photograph one colour flowers without clipping the R,G or Blue.... I tried and could not manage it. What should I try next time around?

Thank you :)

Thank you.

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Originally Posted by xpatUSA

Christina, The reds are not "blown" as in R>254. The first red poppy image has a lot of greens clipped to zero. The second, with the darkened background, has a lot of blues clipped to zero. In both images the color certainly 'pops' but, in nature, even red poppies have a spectral reflectivity that includes some greens and blues in daylight. So, whenever we see a flower color that has R or G or B at zero, we should suspect the worst, I reckon ;-)

Sorry!

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Originally Posted by Christina S

. . . So it seems that it is quite challenging to photograph one colour flowers without clipping the R,G or Blue....

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Absolutely!

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What should I try next time around?

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The thing would be to reduce the saturation as early as possible in the processing chain. I'll stick my neck out and say that it may better to avoid bright sunlight, as an experiment. A raw image will look less pretty to start with but when you convert inevitably to aRGB (or sRGB for the monitor or web posting) there will be less color clipping at the low end. Then saturation can be applied until the image looks good to your taste by messing with the sliders (always checking the color histogram, never luminosity and never combined RGB). That is just one idea and I've never tried it, BTW.

For JPEGS out of the camera, you could trying setting the saturation option to minimum and bringing it back in post.

If your editor allows, always use ProPhoto as your working space and reduce the saturation before converting to aRGB or sRGB. I've done that and it works, once you get the reduction amount right.

More that one way to skin a saturated cat . . hopefully others will have suggestions too!

Hi Ted,

Thank you for teaching me something new. I found another flower which just had a bit of clipping in the green (taken on a cloudy day) interestingly the jpeg showed just a wee bit of green clipping but the raw file showed quite a bit of green clipping.

I worked on the raw file, decreased the saturation about 32% and that got rid of the green clipping. Then I messed with the red in elements 9 and while the red looks a little orange, I learned a few new things. Thank you for that.

here is the edit, on a strange composition, quickly done just to show... (hopefully no green clipping here)

http://backup.cambridgeincolour.com/...opyccpoppy.jpg

Thank you.

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Originally Posted by Christina S

Hi Ted,

Thank you for teaching me something new. I found another flower which just had a bit of clipping in the green (taken on a cloudy day) interestingly the jpeg showed just a wee bit of green clipping but the raw file showed quite a bit of green clipping.

I worked on the raw file, decreased the saturation about 32% and that got rid of the green clipping. Then I messed with the red in elements 9 and while the red looks a little orange, I learned a few new things. Thank you for that.

here is the edit, on a strange composition, quickly done just to show... (hopefully no green clipping here)

http://backup.cambridgeincolour.com/...opyccpoppy.jpg

Thank you.

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Hi Christina, So far, no apparent " green " in this image. Seems you're really getting there, producing images according to your vision.

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Originally Posted by Christina S

I worked on the raw file, decreased the saturation about 32% and that got rid of the green clipping. Then I messed with the red in elements 9 and while the red looks a little orange, I learned a few new things.

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Hello Christina,

Nice second shot there. Here's how it looks in ColorThink 3D :-)

http://backup.cambridgeincolour.com/...mutChris02.jpg

All well within the sRGB color space as can be seen. There's even room for a little more contrast and more saturation if that's what floats your boat.

Hello Ted,

Thank you for the extra info but I am sorry to say that I don't know have a clue as to what it is but I suspect I should know...? I also forgot to say that I don't know what ProPhoto is...

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Originally Posted by xpatUSA

Hello Christina,

Nice second shot there. Here's how it looks in ColorThink 3D :-)

http://backup.cambridgeincolour.com/...mutChris02.jpg

All well within the sRGB color space as can be seen. There's even room for a little more contrast and more saturation if that's what floats your boat.

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Just to make sure there's no misunderstanding:
there are two different problems with photographing red (or yellow) flowers.

First is that the camera metering underestimates the red channel when determining the exposure, which means that the
red channel can be clipped through saturation of the sensor. (Same for blue, but that seems less often a problem). There
are some tricks to salvage something, but basically, a cliiped signal mean NO detail in that zone (the RAW data have no
red channel detail in that zone) .

Second is the colours can be outside the gamut you use for editing/viewing/printing. In that case, there is a way to keep detail
in the image regions concerned by using the proper colour space conversions (i.e. one that shifts all colours to adapt to a
smaller colour space, instead of just clipping the out-of-gamut colours). Perceptual intent does this. Note that in this case we
do have all the image detail in the RAW image.

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Originally Posted by Christina S

Hello Ted,

Thank you for the extra info but I am sorry to say that I don't know have a clue as to what it is but I suspect I should know...?

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Sorry Christina, like many "photologists", I assume that we all know everything ;-)

Because colors are represented visually on monitors as 3-color (RGB) the extent of available colors in a gamut can best be represented as a 3D graph, rather that the familiar (to some) 1931 CIE xyY 2D graph usually used in beginner's tutorials. And sometimes it's better to use axes different than RGB in color models, for various technical reasons. My image for your second attempt above is showing the sRGB color space as a 'ghost' in a 3D color graph which uses the CIELAB color model. Your image is shown as dots sampled by the program. Not obvious, but they are pointing mostly in the red sector of the gamut, and they are all inside the 'ghost'. In this representation, the further from the center of the cross, the more the color saturation. The vertical line represents the lightness of the color.

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I also forgot to say that I don't know what ProPhoto is...

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ProPhoto is a color space just like Adobe aRGB or sRGB. It contains a much wider, larger gamut of color than either one of those spaces.

Here's an article explaining the ProPhoto color space in reasonably simple terms:

http://www.naturephotographers.net/a.../mh1203-1.html

Many photographers suggest that drastic editing should be done with the working space set to ProPhoto. Thus, where an edit would have taken some color outside of the aRGB or sRGB color gamut, that would be less likely while in ProPhoto. However, we don't post stuff in ProPhoto, nor in aRGB, because some folk still have browsers that assume everything is in sRGB - which means your images would look washed out on their stuff. But, the crunch comes when you convert the image from a fine-looking job in ProPhoto to ? in sRGB. Then the conversion method (rendering intent) becomes important, especially for people who print. That is why PhotoShop gives four choices of rendering intent in the Print dialog.

Here's CiC's take . .

www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/color-space-conversion.htm‎

It's a complicated subject and takes a good bit of reading and experimentation to understand. Never give up. Let the sub-conscious work on it and come back later . . .

Good Luck!

Remco, thank you for the additional info...

Ted, thank you so much for the detailed explanation and for the links which I will review.

Thank you to all for helping me understand this.