ESFotoClix Blog

Today I fielded a question from a self-acclaimed purist when it comes to photographic color rendition. He wanted to know how one can reproduce the colors one sees with maximum fidelity. My response, as an ex-purist myself, went like this:

How do you know your eyes aren’t in fact in need of calibration? We know some people are color blind, and for the rest of the population, we perceive hues and subtleties differently. So where’s the standard? As an ex-PURIST who couldn’t reconcile these difficult questions with a 100% representation of “color reality,” my recommendation to you is that you start seeing color as an element that adds appeal to your photos. Yes, do avoid boiled-lobster skin tones (hate that!) and don’t go overboard with saturated greens that make the forest look like astroturf, if that’s your personal taste. But relax about getting things “exactly” like you saw them. Here are a couple of gotchas to help you think about this:

1. Color rendition in the field (if you want to get it dead-on in-camera) will depend on 4 basic components: (a) Picture Control (tone curve + saturation + hue), (b) White balance (WB), (c) your lens, and (d) your sensor. You can only control the first 2, and in my experience, with limited ability to counter-act the last 2. Good luck.
2. Color rendition in post-processing has a lot more flexibility, except for one thing: unless you’re editing the photo on your computer with the original scene lit with the original lighting right in front of you, more good luck to you remembering what it ‘actually’ looked like. Add to this complications with calibrated monitors, whether the other display (printed paper, Web user’s monitor, etc.) will match your colors, and the odds of total color fidelity start to fade into an abyss of frustration.
3. Exact color fidelity isn’t always desired. For instance in cases where ambient light is modifying skin tones or even whites beyond what’s “real” or “expected” you will have to come up with a choice: do I want actuality or do I want it to feel right. Whatever decision you make, because of the two previous points, you will not reach 100% fidelity. It always comes down to a matter of choice.

Once this dawned on me, the whole issue of color rendition became less of a concern, and now I just look to stay within certain bounds rather than look for single-point answers to how an image should look. This is freedom, and I recommend you embrace it.

If you want more food for thought, check out previous discussions at: White balance blog entries.

If you do any sort of post-processing (PP) to your photographs, chances are you’ll sometimes second-guess how you first approached an image. You may do this several times, especially for photos that hold more potential. Given the almost infinite number of possibilities we have at our disposal, perhaps this is inevitable – unless you are really sure of yourself.

The following sample image also resulted from my recent outing to Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs, CO. With the soft, late day lighting I was able to use during the exposure, just before the sun dropped behind a nearby hill, my first take was to preserve the delicate hues, and I did very little by the way of post-processing beyond minor level adjustments and sharpening of the foreground rocks. The result is pleasing and perfectly acceptable.

But could I get a little more pop? And do so without destroying the scene’s mood? A few days after my initial PP attempt, I decided to add more contrast through Curve and Tone mapping adjustments. I also used my trick of de-noising the sky in a separate layer to achieve greater separation from the foreground, sharpened rocks. In addition, this color version now shows more of the texture and form I normally love in B&W conversions.

Speaking of B&W conversions, since I had gotten some interesting results for other scenes at the same locale, my real end-goal was to see how far I could push this particular image. Using B&W’s more representative approach, I applied even greater contrast and achieved the following result. Perhaps it’s a little over-cooked, and I may come back to tone things down in a future version. But for now, I’ll continue to let B&W impress me with its often surprising potential to bring out more in a scene by leaving out color.

What do you think?

In my previous post I showed some photos from my recent visit to Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs, Colorado. When I started to review these photos, the colors and lighting were so compelling, I didn’t give anything but a color treatment a thought. Fortunately, I left on vacation, and after coming back, I started exploring several “lesser” images with B&W conversion. Here an image I first post-processed in color.

It dawned on me that I was missing all the textures in the red rock. Sure, I could bring it out with some drastic post-processing, but the results would be anything but pleasing — simply too far off reality to be acceptable. With B&W, on the other hand, I could push those textures out without being bound to the expectation of realism. The result is shown below.

Surprisingly, though color is generally an aid to depth perception in otherwise two-dimensional photos (warmer colors advance, cooler ones recede), in this case, it is the B&W version that really pops with depth and separation of foreground vs. background.

Truth be told, these next 3 images are the ones that made me go back and reconsider B&W. Shot on an overcast day, the skies did not feature the compelling blues of the first photo, and B&W helped focus attention where it mattered: on shape/form and texture.

We can read all the articles and books we want about how B&W photography accentuates shapes and texture, but there’s nothing like some hands on experience to bring the point home.