Editing photos with ice.

[bigpuddin43]

I took some photos this past weekend after we had some snow and ice. I will say that editing photos of a black dog on snowy ground is tough to keep from clipping one end or the other and still having some contrast.

But the real issue I am having is I took a pic of some brush covered in ice and can't get it to look very good to me. I will post up the original and what I have done with it when I get home today but figured if anyone had any help. Main thing is the ice looks pink.

 

[lambertpix]

It'll obviously help to see the photo you're talking about, but this sounds like one of those areas where shooting in RAW gives you a little more room to adjust the photo while editing. The pink cast sounds like it could be white balance, and clipping won't be solved by shooting in RAW, but you'll have a bit more dynamic range to work with when you try to pull those highlights back. Believe it or not, the black dog on snow might have been a scenario where you could use fill flash to add some detail to the dog without overexposing the background -- hard to say without seeing the photo, though.

 

[bigpuddin43]

I was shooting in raw and got all the dog pictures looking pretty good just had to use the adjustment brush to only bring up the highlights on the dog to keep from whiting out the background. These were just some shots I took to try out Lightroom and I think some of the more difficult to edit and I still did pretty good with them. I think I will like Lightroom pretty well. The ice shot is the only one that I just couldn't get to look decent the rest I was pretty happy with for my level of novice on editing and photography skills. I'll get that picture up this afternoon.

 

[KmH]

For the bush ice shot try adding mid-tone contrast which is done using the Clarity slider.
Increasing the mid-tone contrast also makes a photo look sharper because increasing the mid-tones helps accent edges in a photo.
Another way to think of the Clarity slider is that it enhances local contrast.

The Clarity, Vibrance and Saturation sliders as a group are often known as the Presence group of sliders.
I don't use the Saturation slider much, but I use the Clarity and Vibrance slider on almost every photo I edit.

The Grey Blog: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Tutorial - Part XII - Presence Controls

Lighroom Presence controls - Bing

 

[bigpuddin43]

ok I can't figure out how to upload raw photos on here.

 

[Derrel]

ok I can't figure out how to upload raw photos on here.

RAW format images are not an option for direct uploading to TPF. If you have a free Dropbox account, you could download them to that, and people could go to the URL you provide, and pick them up.

 

[Gavjenks]

RAW in general doesn't really give you any more dynamic range. It just gives you finer steps within the same range.

To get higher dynamic range, your options are generally:
1) Shoot at a lower ISO. Dynamic range improves somewhat dramatically with low ISOs (several stops higher at ISO 100 than at high end ISOs). Chances are you were already at low ISO in bright snow, but maybe you weren't for some reason.
2) Use a camera with larger pixel size (most full frames). Not exactly a viable option just to shoot photos of your dog when it's snowy out.
3) Use HDR multiple captures. Not an option for a moving subject like a leaping dog. Maybe an option if the dog is sitting still just being cute. DEFINITELY an option for a bush. Keep in mind that HDR just means using multiple exposures to increase your dynamic range. It does NOT imply the cartoony style with the enhanced lines, etc. That is a result of "tonemapping" which is a separate step. HDR by itself will simply give you a grayer looking image with less clipping on either end.

 

[bigpuddin43]

thanks guys finally figured it out it was a chromatic aberation issue that I got fixed but decided after working on it that its a horrible photo anyways just way to busy and did not turn out like I had expected. It is way to busy and hurts my eyes to look at maybe its just from staring at it for 15-20 minutes working on it.

 

[lambertpix]

RAW in general doesn't really give you any more dynamic range. It just gives you finer steps within the same range.

As long as you're happy with how your in-camera JPG processing is mapping a 12-bit or 14-bit RAW file into an 8-bit JPG, that's true. If you find that you'd like to fine-tune that processing, though, you'll want to have access to the information actually recorded by the sensor.

 

[Gavjenks]

RAW in general doesn't really give you any more dynamic range. It just gives you finer steps within the same range.

As long as you're happy with how your in-camera JPG processing is mapping a 12-bit or 14-bit RAW file into an 8-bit JPG, that's true. If you find that you'd like to fine-tune that processing, though, you'll want to have access to the information actually recorded by the sensor.

Dynamic range is defined as: (Highest absolute value of a range--in this case lightness) / (Lowest absolute value of a range).
There is absolutely no reason why a jpeg with its 8 bits cannot have the same dynamic range as a file with arbitrarily more bits. You could have 128 bit color depth in your RAW and still not necessarily have more dynamic range than the 8 bit jpeg. Bit depth simply refers to how many slices you have divided your range into. It does NOT imply anything about the LIMITS of that range, which is all that matters for dynamic range calculations.

It is of course entirely possible that depending on your camera software and/or settings, your jpeg might happen to have less dynamic range than your RAW files. But that's just your settings and maybe your camera brand. Nothing about jpeg itself inherently implies lower dynamic range.




Think of it like a ruler:
* Dynamic range would be how long the ruler is (sort of. Actually a geometric ratio not a difference, but close enough for this analogy)
* Bit depth would be how far apart and precise the hash marks are on that ruler.

A jpeg ruler has 256 hash marks along its entire length, while a RAW ruler has 4096 or whatever hash marks. But number of hash marks tells you NOTHING about how long the rulers are, and thus nothing about dynamic range. Either one might be longer than the other, or not. The number of hash marks gives you no indication or clue.

In fact, it is even theoretically possible for a jpeg to have more precision of lightness values than a RAW too. If the jpeg covers a very narrow dynamic range and the RAW a huge one. Imagine a one inch long ruler with 256 hash marks versus a 10 meter long ruler with 4096. The one inch ruler's hash marks will actually be closer together in space, and it will have greater precision over the range that they two share.

 

[KmH]

. . . you'll want to have access to the information actually recorded by the sensor.

FWIW - We don't have access to the information the image sensor pixels actually record.
The image sensor pixels are not capable of recording color. Color has to be interpolated downstream from the pixels.
By the time we first get to see the Raw file as a photo, it has been edited in several ways.

Active pixel sensor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A pixel is a group of analog electronic devices (some transistors and a photodetector diode) that develops an analog voltage proportional to how much light hits it.
The analog pixel voltage has to be converted to a 12-bit or 14-bit digital number, and at that point we lose contact with the original information the pixels recorded.
The analog-to-digital (A/D) converter may be on the image sensor chip but is a separate group of electronics. Analog-to-digital converter - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A/D conversion involves quantization of the input, so it necessarily introduces a small amount of error.

Once the A/D conversion is done the image data file can be written to the memory card.

The image data recorded on the memory card is further altered by the Raw converter that produces the image we humans can see.
Those alterations include:
Demosaicing - a software algorithm that interpolates the colors in the scene based on the layout of the Bayer Array that is in front of the image sensor. Demosaicing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Gamma encoding is used to alter luminosity on the image - The image sensor pixel responds to light in a linear progression (gamma = 1.0). The gamma of each pixel has to be encoded (altered) so the luminosity of the pixel closely approximates the non-linear way human eyes would see the same amount of light (gamma between 2.0 and 3.0). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_correction

Tone mapping - which alters dynamic range. Tone mapping - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Depending on the Raw converter used other alterations to the image data are made - sharpening, noise reduction, etc.

The same Raw image data file on the memory card file when run through different Raw converter applications will look different in each Raw converter because each Raw converter is using slightly different algorithms to produce the photo we see before we get to do any editing.

For more information:
Real World Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS5
The Digital Negative: Raw Image Processing in Lightroom, Camera Raw, and Photoshop
Real World Camera Raw: Exposure and Linear Capture | Exposure and Linear Capture | Peachpit
http://www.adobe.com/digitalimag/pdfs/linear_gamma.pdf