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|| SportsShooter.com: Member Message Board
1DMII and blown reds
Jason DeMott, Photographer
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Gainesville | VA | USA | Posted: 4:45 PM on 04.12.06 |
->> All,
I know the MarkII has been known to blow reds but I'm wondering if there's a workaround or something I might be doing wrong. My 1DMII has the hardest time with the hue of red in the Washington Nationals uniforms. I don't think I'm horribly overexposing the images, but the reds go off the charts. Parameters are Standard in the camera. Could this be helped with a custom tone curve possibly ?
http://www.demottphotography.com/red-problem.jpg
Regards,
-Jason |
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Scott Bort, Student/Intern, Photographer
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Woodstock | Il | USA | Posted: 5:07 PM on 04.12.06 |
->> "I don't think I'm horribly overexposing the images"
But your still overexposing the image and we lose a good chucnk of his white shirt. check out the lower left hand corner of his hat, the red seems to be more accurate as well.
So, next time, manual exposure that doesnt blow your whites as badly and try using a custom white balance as well. |
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Ron Scheffler, Photographer
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Hamilton (Toronto area) | Ontario | Canada | Posted: 10:53 PM on 04.12.06 |
->> I think for that shot, in partial backlighting, you need to make a decision. Are you going to expose more for the shadows or the highlights? I feel your exposure looks good, considering the situation. Any darker and the skin tones will be too dark. I agree though, reds with the Mark II are a problem, especially if they are close to being over exposed. Even normal exposure for other tones can push red values out of gamut.
Sometimes it's possible to pull back detail by selecting the reds by de-saturating them (I find using the master channel rather than just the red channel works better). You could add a de-saturation layer to do this, allowing you to rework areas that might not look right based on the initial selection. Even when de-saturated, the reds will not look right. Possibly still on the pink/magenta side. Make another layer for Selective Color adjustment and add red and yellow to the red channel. You have to eyeball it until you get a combination that looks OK. It would be possible to record this as an action and batch process your files, but the tricky part is in getting a sufficient range of red selected without it also affecting the red in skin tones and possibly other reddish areas. Depending on how you distribute your images, it may be better just to do it by hand to the best ones you're sending out to clients. But then again, some clients prefer photographers leave the files alone and let their prepress departments fix these kinds of problems.
Perhaps before you even get to this stage, you might consider experimenting with the in-camera Color Matrix settings and saturation levels. If I remember the matrices correctly, you may be better to use Matrix 4 (Adobe RGB) since it is a wider color space and may better reproduce reds than what you're getting with whatever matrix you are using now (whichever it is, it's sRGB based on the values displayed by Photo Mechanic). Matrix 4 is also less saturated. While Matrix 1 (standard) and 3 (high saturation) look nice, they can over exaggerate the problem you are seeing with reds. I can understand the desire to have nice punchy, colorful images to send to clients, but as someone who also works in prepress, adding saturation later is better than trying to recover blown out details (whether overexposed white or colors) from an over saturated image.
And, if it's a consistently sunny (or overcast, etc.) day, I would recommend shooting in manual exposure mode rather than auto. Looking at the thumbnails, you can see that the camera is changing the exposure due to changes in the proportion of white uniform to green background. If the quality of the light itself (if not mixed clouds) is not changing from minute to minute, it saves post production work if all your files in one sequence/group/game have the same exposure.
Lastly, while it may be a burden to some photographers, consider shooting in RAW mode (or RAW+JPEG if on deadline) since RAW offers a lot of post production flexibility.
Just be glad that it's early April and you get to shoot baseball outside under the sun - in a real baseball stadium. Not so here in Toronto thanks to the cooler weather and a multipurpose stadium with retractable roof that rarely opens before the end of May. |
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Ron Scheffler, Photographer
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Hamilton (Toronto area) | Ontario | Canada | Posted: 11:35 PM on 04.12.06 |
->> Jason. I took the liberty to post a sample solution here: http://www.pbase.com/scheffler/redsat
Please refer to the caption beneath each screen grab for info.
Hope this helps - Ron |
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Evan Parker, Student/Intern, Photographer
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Seattle | WA | USA | Posted: 3:25 AM on 04.13.06 |
->> It may seem like a pain at first, but go for RAW. It seems to me it would take the same amount of time, or less, to process a Raw file as to do all the color work Ron suggested. And you could batch all the photos with the same problem.
As Michael Grecco hammered home:
"JPEG BAD
JPEG BAD!
JPEG, BAD. . . ." |
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Jason DeMott, Photographer
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Gainesville | VA | USA | Posted: 12:09 PM on 04.13.06 |
->> Thanks to everyone for all the thought/effort put into addressing my question. I will try to shoot manual next time (I always shoot M at night btw) but it's tricky on a harsh day w/ clouds/shadows in play. As much as I don't want to go back to RAW, it sounds like that may just be the fix, mostly because RAW's native color space is ProPhoto RGB, which is an extremely wide gamut. Does anyone use ProPhoto RGB any further down the workflow than the first step ?
Couple related threads on the issue:
http://forums.robgalbraith.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=239390&page=0&fpar...
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/prophoto-rgb.shtml
Thanks again to everyone,
-Jason |
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