Out of gamut color in photo. Take a look and please advise.

[kkamin]

I captured this image in the sRGB color space. The red in the bottom of her dress is clipped, as well as some other white parts in her dress.

My exposure of the photograph was spot on. I was shooting with a Canon xsi.

How do I avoid this? Or how do I fix this in Photoshop?

 

[Sw1tchFX]

honestly, i wouldn't worry about it, it's not that big of a deal in this image.



BUT... if you really want to fret over such a minor detail, shoot RAW and edit in ProPhotoRGB in the RAW converter, you should easily be able to recover both in that gamut.

If you shot Jpeg, there's nothing you can do.

however like i said, for this picture, it doesn't matter, it works just fine. Don't get too caught up in the minor things.

 

[Insanity]

Being new to this, when you say clipped I think of the subject being cutoff. This picture you don't seem to be saying that, so what do you mean by clipped?

 

[kkamin]

Being new to this, when you say clipped I think of the subject being cutoff. This picture you don't seem to be saying that, so what do you mean by clipped?

The above is an example histogram of a red channel that is clipping. You can see on the right side how the graph is piled up on the right. It usually means there are some reds that go beyond the range of the histogram but all get stuck at the highest value.

I hope that makes sense.

If you look at the red dress in the photograph, there is a large triangular patch that is reflecting a hot red, but there is no detail or gradient of color within it. When I captured the image, that triangular patch of color was outside of what I could capture with my camera settings at the time. I don't have any flexibility apparently during post since I captured on jpeg. I'm new to digital imaging on an expert level, I come from darkrooms, so a lot of this is new to me. But in the future I will be capturing on RAW and jpeg.

 

[Garbz]

So make the image darker and nasty.

Having a perfectly clip free image is almost a fetish these days. Honestly not a single person would have picked the dress to be clipped if you hadn't told us, on top of that I actually had to go looking for where the white parts were clipped (some on the collar).

Your solutions are shoot in a wide colour gamut. Oh wait, then the image clips as soon as you print it or upload it to the net or do anything useful with it. Unless that is you're spending uber dollars for a nice chemical print in which case you can probably work with the extra gamut. ... If you're lucky.

My advice to you is to look at the image, not the histogram. What you have is not visible clipping. It's just a funky graph telling you you've hit a limit somewhere that no one in the world would notice. If you have only clipped the red channel in that area then there is still detail in the form of changing green and blue channels. Clipping one channel rarely clobbers any detail but instead tends to introduce colour shifts (like an over exposed leaf turning yellow instead of green).

Btw single channel colour clipping is unavoidable when pure colours exist. For instance there is absolutely nothing you can do to not clip either the R G or B channel if you for instance photograph an LED or laser which emits the same colour spectrum as the little RGBG filter array on your sensor. That is because pure colours can be generated by LEDs, but not displayed on screens, and many colours can't be worked with even in stupidly large gamuts like ProPhoto.

As a stop gap I advise to shoot in RAW, use the "recovery" slider in Adobe CameraRAW if you need to recover anything from a clipped channel, and stay in sRGB.

 

[Insanity]

Being new to this, when you say clipped I think of the subject being cutoff. This picture you don't seem to be saying that, so what do you mean by clipped?

The above is an example histogram of a red channel that is clipping. You can see on the right side how the graph is piled up on the right. It usually means there are some reds that go beyond the range of the histogram but all get stuck at the highest value.

I hope that makes sense.

If you look at the red dress in the photograph, there is a large triangular patch that is reflecting a hot red, but there is no detail or gradient of color within it. When I captured the image, that triangular patch of color was outside of what I could capture with my camera settings at the time. I don't have any flexibility apparently during post since I captured on jpeg. I'm new to digital imaging on an expert level, I come from darkrooms, so a lot of this is new to me. But in the future I will be capturing on RAW and jpeg.

Yeah it makes sense, my untrained eyes are still having a hard time seeing it in the picture though.