Moroccan Red Flowers

[David]

Hi All - I've struggled with this one. Any comments? It is meant to be generally dark, to emphasise the red.




Cheers

David

[ajith.rajeswari]

Hi David,
For me the red color seems to be a bit different, is the red really this dark?
The pink objects on top seems to disturb the frame.
Can you crop the shot to remove the pink objects?
I tried a similar shot (flower with dark background) sometime back.


~Ajith

[Dave Humphries]

Hi David,

I agree with Ajith, I'd crop most of the pink ones off the top, so as not to lose any red and clone out whatever pink is left intruding into the image.

I really like the dark look and deep red personally.
I might be wrong (often am), but it looks to me like they're lit by low angle (hence very 'warm') sunshine.

Nice one,

[Davey]

I'd describe the red as "most delicious". Just quick idea to save time and might be easier etc, perhaps use replace colour tools and shifting colour balance in magenta/purple channels toward red/oranges will bring the pink in line with the subject red so it blends in with less work, and then clone out anything left.

[David]

What helpful and insightful comments, Guys! I thought that I would crop out or alter the pinky tones and that should also give a better balance to the composition. Your views confirm that.

The comment about the reds really being that dark is very interesting. The answer is both yes and no. I made this image as a documentary shot of these "dark" red flowers. When I examined the image on-screen I noticed a curious feature in the histogram. The LHS was piled high, i.e. an awful lot of "darks" and the RHS was piled high, an awful lot of "lights", but no mid-tones. Looking at the image I couldn't see where the light areas were meant to be. Then I realised that all the light areas were the reds. Looking at the red channel shows the red flowers as almost pure white! So, even though the red flowers look dark, they are actually light. The human eye has a problem seeing red as a light colour compared to say yellow which the eye cannot see as a dark colour.

In order to make the red stand out more, I altered the colour balance to reduce further the green and blue components of the background.

Thanks again, I may post an updated version later.

David

[Dave Humphries]

The human eye has a problem seeing red as a light colour compared to say yellow which the eye cannot see as a dark colour.

Indeed it does, TV pictures (my ancient technical background) blend the three primary colour sensors into the luminance channel with 30% red, 59% green and 11% blue, then they superimpose the chrominance; that way monochrome viewers (if there are any left) see something that looks natural.

I'm not looking to go into more detail here, I just wanted to confirm your view.

Cheers,

[Colin Southern]

Keep in mind too that bright reds like that can easily give hue shifts when printing due to out of gamut situations occuring ... Monitors having a native red channel can display it well, but printers don't have a way to create a really bright red - and it tends to shift towards orange if you try and go too bright.

And if that's not bad enough, cameras have trouble capturing it in the first place (red channel blows really easily) - which is why you have to "under-expose" it a bit.

[Dave Humphries]

And if that's not bad enough, cameras have trouble capturing it in the first place (red channel blows really easily) - which is why you have to "under-expose" it a bit.

I certainly see this a lot on my Fuji, glad ACR does such a good job of invisibly fixing such things for me on RAW.

Is this why in camera jpg sometimes exhibit greeny-cyans in almost blown skies?
(because the red channel has nothing further to contribute but the green and blue channels do)

[taken]

the dark red flowers are just fantastic........i think ur struggle was a success but these pink leaves or flowers or watever.........are totally ruining your struggle for sucess the dark red flowers can take on the world by themselves........trust me!