Motif: Fall Colors With Deer

Lillian, i like the photo itself, the colors RGB looks very unnatural. Almost like you hit auto levels and that sometimes works and sometimes does not. I took this one into PS and could do nothing with it, looks a little strange colorwise is all, though like i said, the image itself is very nice!

robert.........

Robert, I greatly respect your digital talents, so I'd like to know more. This originally had a strong blue cast in the scan, I played with Channel Mixer to remove it, might have overdone the red a bit? But overall the image looks OK to me so I wonder if you could be more specific?

Lillian

Lillian, its hard to explain really, could you maybe post the original untouched version?

robert...........

I agree with Robert that the colors are "off" quite a bit here. It looks like they've lost saturation except on the left-hand foreground, and I'd say that the road has too much magenta. Some of the very blue images are really hard to correct; I know I've given up on a few of mine from Glacier!

Nicely composed. Agree that the colors are off. Also, a bit of the slide mount is creeping in on the top.

Lillian,
I really like pictures like this one, where there is a road that leads off to who knows where?? I like the Fall colors.

The photo has great elements. If you burnt in the upper right section and adjusted the color properly, you'ld have a nice photo here. Perhaps you can post the un-adjusted version and let one of the wizards here work on it.

- Dan.

Here it is as the original scan, input appreciated.

This whole PS thing is getting very discouraging. It seems like I never really improve, just learn new and ever more complicated ways to mess up perfectly good images.

As for the difference in the FG vs BG, well it was slightly foggy and cold, and the distant trees are less dominant in the slide and in my memory. I think it would be rather weird if they were as intense as the FG.

The idea behind this image is very nice, Lillian.

Hi Lillian,

I played with this for 10-15 minutes in PS. It's one of those difficult images to get looking right I don't pretend that my version looks terrific, but I've tried to give it a more natural-color look. Given more time, I'm sure that a better job can be done.

Here's what I did: I did an overall color correction for all three channels: mostly decreasing blue and increasing magenta and (slightly) red. I also increased overall saturation, reset black point darker in the left-hand trees' shadow areas, and then increased overall brightness to bring midtones back up. Then I selected the road separately and made it closer to neutral using curves. Then I selected the distant (foggy) trees separately, made their colors less blue, and lightened them overall to retain your impression of fogginess.

Best,
Danny

Lillian, I think this confirms my earlier comment in your other posts. your monitor appears to be badly out of calibration if the colors look normal to you.

EJ, I don't think you've ever said anything about my monitor, nor did I say they looked "normal." My comments have been that I have trouble gauging what looks "right," or making certain colors appear right to others. The monitor is an LCD, can't be calibrated as far as I know, but seems to show me what others see on theirs. Part of the problem is just me, I often don't "see" or at least notice, color shifts toward the red or magenta side until someone else points them out.

Mostly I'm just frustrated that expertise in digital manipulation seems to be displacing the pleasure in obtaining a nice image in the first place. To me, photography isn't about spending hours in front of my computer learning how to "tweak."

Robert, thank you again. I frankly didn't follow most of what you did but your image, while still a little weird, does look better than mine.

Lillian, lol, im no expert beleive me. E.J did mention this in your last post. My guess on this one here is that the film used for this image wasnt the top of the line film. Seeing the original untouched version is what makes me think this. Dannys repost does look better, but it still seems a little off. No biggy, Lillian, do not get frustrated with this whole digital thing. Its not easy, theres many here with photoshop skills that can amaze. I have only the basics down myself, and i do plan on learning alot more techniques over this winter to better myself for i feel that this will soon be the future of all that deals with photography. It takes time and patience and alot of it. And both i am limited in myself but theres soo much to learn, and while aquireing the skills, the possibilities are endless im sure. Stick with it, theres many here including myself and those like E.J and Danny with tons of knowledge regarding all this that are only trying and more then happy to help. But you already knew that

TTYlater,
robert.......

Oops, I meant Danny. Sorry. But Robert did such nice things with my wheat field image yesterday.

The film was Provia 100f, which I still use. Pretty "top of the line" I think, tempting as it would be to blame something like that. I had a lot of trouble getting greens and browns right with my old Nikon Coolscan LS 1000 -- this was also one of my early scan efforts. The slide is out at a PSA salon right now, I might rescan it in my "new" CanoScan 4000 when it comes back. This was also long before I knew anything about warming filters, which I think might have helped. The image overall is a bit soft (pre-scan, the scan is worse though) reflecting my poor grasp of shutter speeds etc at the time. The slide itself also has a bit of a blue cast, exaggerated in the scan -- hence my comment about a warming filter. Oh, well, I've played with it a little bit today and I think I've done better. Not sure I'm going to post anymore images where color is "the" thing.

Lillian,

Provia 100F can have quite a blue cast, which is more noticeable in overcast light...well, any conditions or time of day that has a lot of blue in the light, to be more accurate. It's a good film, but when combined with shooting at "blue" times of the day, it can become difficult to remove the blue cast from scans. This has happened with my results from the Smokies, Grand Canyon, etc. where I wasn't really shooting in "blue" light, but the blue haze that appears in the distance really comes out in Provia. I find it hard to adjust once it's there...a slight cast is easy to remove, but if you're shooting in shadow it's almost impossible to make it look "normal". Lately I've been shooting Velvia 100F in preference to Provia: it scans magenta instead of blue, but I've found it much easier to correct than Provia blues. Right now I'm trying some Astia 100F...it's much less punchy and saturated than the other Fuji films, but it's supposed to be great for scanning, and I can adjust the color and saturation the way I want in Photoshop. I'll report back after I've seen the results!

Here's my adjustment.
It looks like it already has a lot of compression. You can see artifacts on the side of the road after I worked on it. Also, the image didn't look very sharp. Did you sharpen it?

- Dan.

Lillian Roberts wrote:EJ, I don't think you've ever said anything about my monitor.

I sure did:
http://www.naturescapes.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=1489