Could use some advice -- very frustrated!

[Qveon]

Im surprised this hasn't been discussed, but a big thing to do with the clipping is not the expose, but the color profile that the camera is shooting in. All camera previews (and cameras with no RAW capabilities) in the camera view in sRGB which is a small color gamut and cannot effectively reproduce the colors that the sensor is picking up on shutter release. So it clips those colors. Now i'm assuming that you are loading this into Photoshop to view the picture and if you have your Default working color space set to anything but sRGB, the color space is larger and can reproduce those colors, but since it came from an already converted in-camera sRGB, those details are already lost. And with the origional file, by pulling back on blue, you are effectively changing the color of the sky to a shade of blue that can be reproduced in your working color profile.

 

[weepete]

Hi Joe, I may be being a bit daft but as far as I knew the histogram is a gude. The real question is do the blues in your and your students camera look off?

In the pic you posted looks fine to me. And that is the ultimate goal. As photographers we should know the technical detail to produce the shot that's in our head..... but I dont see the problem. If it looks good that is what you want

Show your students the digital rev video pro tog cheap camera

Yes the blue skies in my student's photos look off and the pic I posted does not look fine to me. When the blue channel is clipped it shows. Here's another example where the camera software badly clipped the blue channel. It looks off to me. If it looks good to you then we have different standards. Thanks.

Joe

View attachment 37049

Fair play mate, I can see this one looks off and point taken, you've obviously got a more educated eye than me. The only possibility I can think of is an ND filter then, but I recon if was that simple you'd already have worked it out.

 

[Ysarex]

Hi Joe, I may be being a bit daft but as far as I knew the histogram is a gude. The real question is do the blues in your and your students camera look off?

In the pic you posted looks fine to me. And that is the ultimate goal. As photographers we should know the technical detail to produce the shot that's in our head..... but I dont see the problem. If it looks good that is what you want

Show your students the digital rev video pro tog cheap camera

Yes the blue skies in my student's photos look off and the pic I posted does not look fine to me. When the blue channel is clipped it shows. Here's another example where the camera software badly clipped the blue channel. It looks off to me. If it looks good to you then we have different standards. Thanks.

Joe

View attachment 37049

Fair play mate, I can see this one looks off and point taken, you've obviously got a more educated eye than me. The only possibility I can think of is an ND filter then, but I recon if was that simple you'd already have worked it out.

Thanks, and the same to you. The low-res screen images don't show the extent of the problem. If you zoom in on a full-res image you can see the banding in the sky where there's solid segments of 255 blue. You couldn't see that in these little photos.

I don't know why the bleepin' cameras have to do that, but right now I've got basically the same thing from a Canon T3i, a Canon Powershot, a Sony Cybershot, a Sony NEX 5, and a Nikon D3200 -- afternoon sunny day front-lit landscape with a clear blue sky and the blue channel is toast. They're not overexposed photos. I look at the exif data and nothing stands out as an obvious cause. Thanks for listening.

Joe

 

[TCampbell]

Yes the blue skies in my student's photos look off and the pic I posted does not look fine to me. When the blue channel is clipped it shows. Here's another example where the camera software badly clipped the blue channel. It looks off to me. If it looks good to you then we have different standards. Thanks.

Joe

View attachment 37049

Joe,

The EXIF on this image says it's taken at ISO 200, f/11, and 1/256 sec. That seems a bit bright for the shooting conditions (perhaps about 2/3rds of a stop over). Consider a Sunny 16 exposure guideline for mid-day sun would be f/16 (and this is f/11) and a shutter speed which is the inverse of the ISO.

I've gone digging through (I thought I posted this reply already, but I don't see it in the thread so I probably screwed up and never submitted the reply) my 5D II pics and I can't find anything with a blown out blue channel.

Your original photo shows ISO 200, 1/250th and f/9 -- even brighter. Have you tried ignoring the light meter and shooting at a straight sunny-16?

 

[duhast]

I've got nuthin' about the tech questions, because I don't know squat about any of that stuff, being a complete digital noob myself. What surprised me though is that half the class has p&s cameras in a college class. What ever happened to equipment requirements? I was a photo major 40 years ago at OCC, when it was the top junior college photo department in the nation, and what you describe would be like me showing up at Photo 180, Intro to Professional with an Instamatic. I would have gotten laughed out of class...

 

[Mike_E]

1st YGWYPF (you get what you pay for) should be the first class taken in High School but since most High Schools are still designed to produce good little workers/consumers it looks like you're stuck with the job.

You don't get Zeiss results with Promaster equipment. Ravell doesn't sound the same from a boom box as it does through Klipschhorns (talk about dynamic range!) and P&S cameras aren't good for all applications.

The built-in UV filters are what they are. You can reduce your exposure as TCampbell suggested or throw a filter in front of it.

Frankly I'm amazed that there aren't CPols for P&S cameras at every wal-mart.



$0.02