Photodigitary

Flower Time

I love this time of year with all of the flowers. One reason we moved from Minnesota to California was because of the long spring. In Minnesota, it is very short — green leaves are out around May first and summer starts by mid-June. I am basing this on flowers and spring growth. In Southern California, that same time starts about the end of January and ends in mid-June.

I was up in Los Osos doing a workshop with the great folks at Light Photographic Workshops two weeks ago. We were doing flowers and landscapes and the flowers definitely cooperated. Here are some images with some brief notes about them from that week.

The opening shot is of a blue dick flower. A lot of people don’t appreciate the high quality you can get with an achromatic close-up lens. This was shot at a telephoto zoom setting with my Canon G11 and an achromatic close-up lens (this one from Century Optics, though Canon makes some good ones, too). Blue flowers don’t always record as blue, which was true here, so I had to correct the color in the computer (hue adjustment in Photoshop or Lightroom).

Lupines on a hill at dusk after a storm. There  is no camera that can capture the full range of brightness in a scene like this even though we can see it fine. HDR doesn’t work because it was windy and the flowers were blowing, plus HDR affects the whole image. I shot two exposures, one for the sky and one for the lupines. I processed them in Lightroom then combined the exposures in Photoshop to get an image more accurate to the scene. I then added some traditional “burning in” (darkening) to the edges and bottom for more drama.

Telephotos for close ups give a really nice look with limited depth of field and a change in perspective. This makes the background a pleasing color and tonality.

I also like wide-angles up close. This gives the flower a context and environment. It places it into a specific ecosystem. The trick is to deal with the extended space and depth of field that can make the composition too busy. In this case, the low early light and the sky makes the monkey flowers stand out.

Here’s a good case for a tilting LCD. I had climbed a hill with the group where some bush lupines were. I decided to travel light with only my G11. I got this high angle by holding the camera over my head and framing with the tilting LCD.

In June, I will be leading a workshop on the landscapes and flowers of the Eastern Sierras. Late June offers some wonderful wildflowers in the mountains there. I will be working the area from Lone Pine, California, to Yosemite. GAPW June Eastern Sierras.

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Digital camera techniques, Lightroom, Photoshop, landscape photography, nature photography | 1 Comment »

Cropping Photos

The question often comes up in workshops and classes. When should one crop? Is one allowed to crop? (Yes, that question does come up. Some instructors evidently are rather severe about cropping).

I believe that ideally, you should be looking for the best possible composition as you shoot. You should always be trying to have as complete a photo as possible captured when you take the picture. I don’t have any problems with cropping as long as one is not using that as a substitute for seeing the scene well in the first place.

The problem with cropping is that you can only crop what you have recorded with your camera. You cannot get a new and better composition of the whole scene because what you have recorded is not the whole scene, only part. So cropping can only give something less than what was available on location and cannot expand your options.

Another problem with cropping is that you lose image quality. I hear an interesting thing all the time — photographers who like the multi-multi-megapixel cameras because they can crop the image and still have high image quality. There are problems with that. It definitely means one is trying to substitute cropping for seeing the scene well in the first place. Sure, one can crop, but the real question becomes what did that photographer miss in the first place that means he or she has to crop now … and crop out of a limited view of the subject and scene (because what is in the photo is all you have).

It is possible to compose a full image right from the start, and that goes for anyone. If you start relying on cropping to finish your photos, then you are not getting your best images when the subject is actually in front of your camera. The way to use the whole image area is to really look at it and really see it. Years ago, I taught myself to scan the edges of the image every time I took a photo. This included photojournalistic work I was doing at the time and was hammered into me by one of my mentors. He allowed no excuses for a moving and changing subject. Now, with digital cameras, you can always check your LCD playback to see what you are getting and make adjustments to your compositional choices.

That said, you should always present your best version of your photograph. If that means cropping the photo, then crop the photo. We all get stuff along the edges of the image at times that we did not see, whether that is because of wind or dark conditions or just shooting too fast. So cropping is important to get rid of the junk. But regardless of the situation, you don’t need to say you cropped your photo. Your viewers don’t care, or at least, they should be so interested in your photograph that they don’t care.

The photo of Bridal Veil Fall in Yosemite National Park at the top of this blog entry is uncropped. That is exactly what I saw and captured with the camera. The photo of the snow plant below is cropped on the right side. I was shooting with the live LCD and the dark straps of my camera backpack blended in with the dark background — I did not see them hanging out along the right side of the photo. But I saw them when I opened the photo on the computer. I loved the shot, but the straps had to go, so they were cropped out.

By the way, I find Lightroom is a wonderful tool for cropping because it is non-destructive and you can change your crop as much as you want. A tip for experimenting with cropping is to make a virtual copy (or copies) of your photo and do crops on it so you can compare the results with the original.

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Digital camera techniques, Lightroom, Photoshop, landscape photography | 3 Comments »

Getting Neutral Tones Where You Need Them

A friend of mine is a pilot and was frustrated by photographing clouds. He could never get the color right.

I gave him some ideas, something he might try for color in clouds, and thought my readers would be interested in this, too. While he was talking about clouds, the techniques here work for any situation where color is off. I will give this for Photoshop and Lightroom/Camera Raw. The key to doing this is to understand that you are using a control that works to make neutral tones neutral, i.e., whites, grays and blacks without color casts. You do need to have an idea of where the neutral tones are in a photo (parts of clouds are typically neutral, to use my friend’s example), but this does not have to be precise. You simply click on whatever you think should be neutral and keep clicking new spots until the photo looks good. If some of your clicks look bad, so what? Just click somewhere else. Here are the steps:

Photoshop and Photoshop Elements:
1. Open a Levels adjustment layer over your photo.
2. Click on the middle eyedropper of the three eyedroppers in Levels in order to select it.
3. Move your cursor onto the photo (the cursor will look like an eyedropper).
4. Click with the bottom of the eyedropper on parts of the photo that should be neutral (the middle eyedropper is for taking color casts out of neutral tones — you can click on white, gray or black sorts of tones).
5. Keep clicking until you are close, but a little over-adjusted.
6. Use Layer Opacity to control how strong the layer is applied.

Lightroom and Camera Raw:
1. Click on the White Balance eyedropper (in the toolbar at top with Camera Raw, in Basic in Develop in Lightroom).
2. Uncheck auto dismiss (in toolbar in Lightroom below photo)
3. Move your cursor onto the photo — it will be an eyedropper.
4. Click with the bottom of the eyedropper on parts of the photo that should be neutral (the WB eyedropper is for taking color casts out of neutral tones such as white, gray and black).
5. Keep clicking until you get what you want.
6. Tweak adjustment if needed with Temperature and Tint adjustment sliders.

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Lightroom, Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Photoshop techniques | Comments Off

New Software

I want to tell you about some new software I am using, but before I do that, I feel a need to qualify this blog. I love software that helps me get better results from my photography and makes it easier and faster to work with photos — so I get excited about anything that does this. However, I realize that not everyone will share my excitement, and that’s okay. I don’t think everyone needs to do the same things with their images. I also cannot tell you if you will like this program, if it fits your workflow or your budget. I can only tell you what I like and how it affects my work. I say these things because I know that it is easy to get excited about software and not appreciate that the cost may be a significant factor for people who don’t work with these things for a living like I do.

Okay, the software. Nik Software just introduced Viveza 2, the latest version of this software. I like a number of things about it, including its original technology for carefully controlling adjustments in a specific area of the photo. I saw this technology, U-Point, in development years ago and was quite impressed with it at the time. U-Point technology is in a number of programs now for Nik Software, including Nikon Capture (also made by Nik), Dfine and Color Efex Pro (all very good, highly photographer-centric programs). Viveza uses the technology to create what is essentially an alternative to Photoshop’s adjustment layers and layer masks. You click on something in the photo you want to adjust.

You then adjust the brightness, contrast, saturation (which, by the way, is a far better saturation control than the one in Photoshop) and an area to be influenced. The U-Point technology finds similar color, tone and texture to what you clicked on and limits adjustments to that. You don’t have to do any selections or work with layer masks. In addition, you can add minus control points to places that are being adjusted to prevent them from being adjusted. This is just a click on the photo and you have control. The U-Point technology is very good at finding just the colors, textures, etc. that you want without a lot of work on your part.

Viveza 1 did all of that. What 2 does is add some very nice global controls that allow you to quickly and easily adjust the overall image, plus you gain a new adjustment parameter called Structure. I am so impressed with Structure (which can be used overall or with selected points using U-Point technology) that for nature photography, I find it alone is worth the price of the program.

Now do you see why I qualified this blog in my opening paragraph? I know that some people will think I am crazy saying that one small feature is worth the price of software that is not inexpensive. It all depends on your work and what you like to do. For me, Structure solves a problem I have long struggled with, and that is getting good detail and tonal rendition in the mid-tones, especially the dark tones. Clarity in Lightroom and Camera Raw is a good addition to those programs and does that to a degree. However, I find that clarity can quickly make a subject look harsh and you can lose subtle tonalities. Structure doesn’t do that. It gives great “structure” to tonalities without making them look harsh or destroying subtle tonalities. And to have that in both overall and local adjustments is great.

In the photos I have uploaded, you will see a first photo as it might come from Lightroom or Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. Then you see an overall adjustment to structure — notice how the granite rocks really become defined much better. Then I added some local adjustments to just the sky and the flowers. Bright yellow flowers can be difficult to really define because of the way that digital cameras handle bright colors, but Structure has allowed me to bring out their detail and even add some quality saturation (you can see this well in the preview at the bottom right — the left side is before, the right side is after).

Viveza 2 works with Lightroom as an export plug-in, Photoshop and Photoshop Elements as normal plug-ins. Frankly, the average photographer could use Photoshop Elements and Viveza and do work better and faster than most photographers working with Photoshop alone.  Nik Software is at www.niksoftware.com.

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Lightroom, Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Photoshop techniques | Comments Off

What Do Cameras Really Do, Anyway?

I find it curious that so many students feel they have to “confess” to doing perfectly normal “darkroom” work in the computer. So you added contrast and saturation to the image file. Often a photograph needs something like that to correctly interpret a scene.

I think this comes from a misinterpretation of what cameras really do and because people have gotten afraid of being accused of “Photoshopping” their photos. What the camera does not do is create an arbitrarily objective view of the world. The camera creates a very biased look at the world based on the limitations of the sensor, image processing done inside the camera (which is done even with RAW), and very subjective decisions by engineers and designers of the camera. Every camera is a compromise in terms of image capture because it must do a good job with all sorts of photographers, plus sensors have some issues with tonalities and colors, and camera designers know this. It is impossible to create a camera that could capture every scene of every photographer’s vision objectively because conditions are so varied.

All photography is interpretation. Nothing else is actually possible because you cannot put the real world into a picture. You can only capture a representation of it that is defined and limited by what a camera can actually do in capturing a scene. The great LIFE photographer, Andreas Feininger, talked about this many years ago in his photography books published during the 1960s and 1970s. He noted that a photograph is rarely the same size as the real world scene, it has only two dimensions to represent a three-dimensional world, it is limited to one vantage point that cannot be shifted, it includes none of the subjective things that we always react to when we are in the real world such as heat, cold, smells, sounds, and so forth (these actually do influence what we see), and more so that any photograph is always an interpretation of the world.

In fact, he went further and said that an unadjusted photograph is very often any inaccurate interpretation of the world (he called it a lie) because many of its elements are undefined in relationship to this interpretation. I believe this is important if as photographers we are to get images that truthfully and accurately interpret the world for our audiences. We have a responsibility as a photographer to be sure that the image appropriately interprets the world so that our audiences better see and understand our world.

I once had somebody tell me that they didn’t worry about this concerning nature photography because nature is perfect so all they had to do is take a picture of it. It may be true that nature can be perfect, but a photograph of nature is not the same as nature. A photograph of nature can be very imperfect and can even lead us astray from what is really important in the scene. Often we must make some corrections to the original photo as interpreted by the camera so that it more accurately reflects an appropriate interpretation of the scene.

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Nature, Photoshop, nature photography | 1 Comment »

Workflow Perfection or Excellence?

It is interesting when talking about workflow, that few people discuss the difference between working for excellence and working for perfection. I am guilty of that as well. It is very easy to talk about all of the things a photographer can and “should” do in Lightroom or Photoshop, but not get into the decision making process of why do something in that workflow at all.

Over the years, I have often thought about the difference between striving for excellence and or for perfection. I have struggled with this at times, too, but today, I recognize that striving for excellence is a good goal, while striving for perfection will lead more often to frustration and disappointment. It is impossible to ever be perfect, yet we can reach excellence. There was a well known book called, On Excellence, by John Kenneth Galbraith, years ago that really helped me face this issue. Excellence means you set a high standard and work to achieve that. That is generally possible. Perfection is always an elusive goal because as humans, we can never be perfect.

Perfection as a goal gives another problem — how to deal with choices. If you must be perfect, that means there is always the possibility of a better option than what you are doing. That can drive you crazy. If you strive for excellence, you know what that means and when you make a choice that gets you there, you need do nothing else.

This strongly affects how we deal with workflow. If you strive for excellence, then the choice between 8-bit or 16-bit files is easy — if your image has reached a standard of excellence at 8-bit, why bother with the effort that 16-bit requires? Or color space — if AdobeRGB does the right job for your photo, why worry about other color spaces, no matter what anyone else says?

This affects things like using specific tools in Lightroom or Photoshop. I know that some photographers start thinking that they have to use certain tools because someone said they had to, so they need to do that for some ideal of processing perfection. Yet, if your image has reached a level of excellence for what you want and you never touched the Graduated Filter or Adjustment Brush in Lightroom, then why bother taking the time or effort? If you constantly think you need to do “something else” to your photo (which will always happen if it has to be perfect as you can never reach perfection), then you will constantly fiddle with controls you don’t need. That will mess up your time and effort with your photos in the computer.

For nature photographers, too, I think we might learn a bit from nature on this one. You could argue how perfect nature is. Some people will say it is, but then others will point out “problems”, but both are really perspectives outside of nature itself. Nature doesn’t strive for perfection — look at all of the variation in a given species of plant or animal — perfection implies no variation. Nature does strive for excellence, in a sense, because anything less means you don’t survive. A wolf doesn’t care about hunting with perfection, simply the excellence that brings down the prey or not. A flower doesn’t care about perfection, only about excellence that ensures pollination occurs.

Striving for excellence does not mean that if you achieve it, that you do not look to improve your skills. I am finding, for example, that I am tending to pay more attention to opening up dark tones and the details there in my images than I did either in the traditional darkroom or when I first started working on images in the computer. I think that is improving my shots. I have always striven for excellence, but as I learn new things, I adapt my work to that.

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Digital camera techniques, Equipment thoughts, Lightroom, Nature, Photoshop, Photoshop Elements | Comments Off

Better Prints the Old-Fashioned Way

I often hear from photographers who are doing everything right for printing, but they have trouble getting a good print. No matter what they do, the print seems to be different than what they expect from what is on the monitor. Then they read about computer gurus who seem to get perfect prints every time and so feel really depressed about doing such a terrible job with printing.

Okay, first thing, stop blaming yourself. Unfortunately, this problem is not uncommon. For some reason, on some computer systems (Mac or PC), Adobe products don’t always communicate as well as they should with certain printers. You can try re-installing the printer driver, but that might not help. I have had this happen to me and I have seen it happen to many photographers, so I know this is real. Digital printing is not pure technology and science. Sometimes we have to apply a little art of printing to get the prints we need.

That doesn’t have to be a problem, though. Your goal is a good print, not a technologically perfect system. Now in the days of the traditional darkroom, a photographer often got less than perfect prints when starting to print an image. That was no big deal. He or she considered that a workprint and simply a step on the way to get a good print. Even a master like Ansel Adams, who you know could have banged out a great print in an instant, considered his first prints to be workprints, prints to study to figure out what would make a really good print.

I think we have been suckered into believing that the computer, printers, color profiles, calibration, etc., etc., will always give us the technology we need to get a great print. In some ways, these may be misleading us toward getting good prints, but not necessarily great prints, but that’s another story. It is related, though. The story on this blog is dealing with those situations where you can’t even get a good print.

This is one place where Lightroom really shines because it is no big deal if the print is not perfect. Simply make a virtual copy of your finished development of the image (the easiest way to do that is to right click the image to get a contextual menu, then pick virtual copy about half-way up). Now go to Develop and make an adjustment to the image using brightness, contrast or color controls that you guess will correct the printing problem. Then print this virtual copy. Still not right? Try another adjustment until it is. You are not trying to match the monitor (which can take you down the wrong path anyway, because the monitor is never a print and a print is never the monitor). Just look at the print and decide if it is a good print or not. Then write down the difference of adjustment between the first image and this virtual copy and keep those at hand for future prints on the same paper (it is possible to create a Develop preset, but this can be a little tricky, so writing this down works).

Now I am going to tell you that doing this will take less time, frustrate you less, and allow you to keep more of your hair in place than trying in vain to make the computer and printer communicate properly. If you are really computer savvy, you might succeed at that, but I find most photographers are not and this process, which is based on how we used to work in the darkroom, is much more calming.

If you are working with Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, you can do something similar by adding an adjustment layer to your image when it is ready to print. You could try Brightness/Contrast, Levels or Curves for a too dark or too light print; Hue/Saturation or Color Balance for color. For example if your photo is too dark, add brightness to your image in an amount you guess would make the print look better and reprint. Since you are using an adjustment layer, you can then readjust this for another print if your guess was wrong. Then when you get a print you like, either write down that adjustment’s numbers (probably the easiest way to do this) or save a file with that adjustment layer intact for repeat use later, then whenever you print again, add an adjustment layer with those adjustments.

This is so much easier than pulling your hair out. And yes, you will not be matching your monitor, but I am not a big believer in that anyway. A good print is a good print in your hands, not simply something that matches the monitor. The monitor can be used as a reference or guide, but no one who sees your print will ever ask to see the monitor to see if it matches. They will simply judge how well they like the print from what it looks like.

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Lightroom, Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Photoshop techniques | 2 Comments »

Black-and-White

Black-and-white photography has gained a resurgence of interest that is well-deserved. It is interesting that the impact of black-and-white and photography has really changed. Not all that long ago, back in the 1980s for example, it was considered the “cheap” photography. It was what appeared in the cheap magazines or in the cheap pages of those publications. It was not treated well.

Black-and-white had once been the only way to experience photography. Masters such as Ansel Adams, W. Eugene Smith and Bill Brandt elevated it to high levels of quality and style. But when color became popular, black-and-white lost out. It was the opposite of “impact.”

Today, color is the major way photography is seen. Publications emphasize it. Even newspapers use it heavily. It is what everybody uses for photography. And that is exactly why a good black-and-white image has impact. It is not the way everyone shoots. It is not the expected way of seeing a subject.

But it has to be good. The simple conversion of color to black-and-white through any program using one option such as Grayscale or Desaturate is often disappointing. The key to a good conversion is to think of it as a translation of color to specific shades of gray. The wrong shades of gray will make a photo look bad, yet the right shades of gray will make it look great.

The latest versions of Photoshop and Photoshop Elements have good black-and-white conversion features that can be helpful if you really play with the controls rather than simply accepting the first look you see. This can definitely mean some playing around with those adjustments, seeing bad black-and-white and good. I like the controls in Lightroom 2, which are similar to those in Photoshop CS4 in that you can create an “activated cursor” where you click the cursor on something in the photo, the program finds the right color for you, and you drag the cursor up and down (Lightroom) or left and right (CS4) to get the color the right shade of gray. This means you don’t have to think about what color is what as the program finds it for you.

What you are always looking for when converting color to black-and-white is making the image clear and understandable in black-and-white. A good example is an image with a red flower against green grass. A straightforward translation will make the two colors show up as the same shade of gray as red and green are often the same brightness — not a very attractive or understandable image. When you change the translation of these colors to grays, you can make the flowers light and the grass dark, the grass light and the flowers dark, or many steps in between.

What is right depends on what you want the photo to express. Once you make the basic translation, you also need to make the photo look right in terms of blacks, whites and midtones, just like in color, but the interpretation will be different because of the change from color to black-and-white. This may mean increasing the blacks to be blacker and giving more contrast to the image as black-and-white often needs that compared to color. But never consider that an absolute. You may find that a subtle, open tonality in the midtones is needed for a particular subject.

I also think very highly of Nik Software Silver Efex if you are really serious about black-and-white. This is a plug-in for Photoshop, Photoshop Elements and Lightroom. It has a lot of presets that can quickly get you a look you like, plus it has a lot of control over how colors are changed to gray as well as quickly giving you overall control of the tonality and contrast of the image.

I also spend a bit of time talking about black-and-white in a number of my books, including The Magic of Digital Nature Photography and the Epson Complete Guide to Digital Printing.

Posted in Digital camera techniques, Lightroom, Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, nature photography | 2 Comments »

Muddy dark tones

One thing I see a lot of is what I like to call “muddy dark tones.” This is when the dark parts of an image have their tonalities sort of mush together like the tones of mud. The photo here is from Machu Picchu and has dark tones in it, but they have life and vitality in them, giving life to the photo. Where things are black, they are black and not trying to be dark tones.

Muddy tones can be avoided first when shooting. The first thing to understand as there is no such thing as an arbitrarily “correct shape” to a histogram. You cannot control that — that is a function of the scene. What you want to do is be sure is that there is no large gap at the right side of the histogram — that is a problem for a lot of reasons, including:

• you are not using the sensor efficiently or in its most optimum range
• you are compressing dark tones
• you may be getting less than the full range of tones the camera can handle
• you can increase noise.

In processing your image, you can look to see what is happening to the left or dark side of the histogram. Opening it up can help, depending on the scene. That means having a calibrated monitor in order to see this. With Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, this usually means working the low end of Curves (shadow and dark for Elements’ Color Curves) or using a Screen technique for layers and changing the opacity of the layer (note on that at the end of this blog).

I really like some of the controls in Lightroom 2 that allow you to open dark tones and give them definition so they do not look muddy — this includes the Fill slider (but be careful not to overuse it or the scene will look unlike anything that exists on this planet) and the shadow and dark sliders of the Tone curve. A challenge with all of this is that the world doesn’t follow rules very well! Growing as a photographer means, to a degree, gaining experience with all sorts of conditions and recognizing how different conditions change the way we interpret exposure.

Note on using Screen: Add an adjustment layer to your photo (Levels works fine). Click okay (if needed) without actually doing to the adjustment. This gives you an adjustment layer without any adjustments. Now go to the Blending Modes. They will say Normal by default and are at the top left of the Layers palette. Click on Normal to get a blending modes list. Then select Screen. Your photo will get lighter, but most of the effect is in the dark areas. Use the Opacity of the layer to tone this adjustment down, reducing Opacity until things look right. You can also use the layer mask with your adjustment layer to selectively allow or block the Screen adjustment.

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Digital camera techniques, Lightroom, Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Photoshop techniques | Comments Off

White Balance and RAW

I often hear that you don’t need to choose a white balance setting when shooting if you are shooting RAW, so I am coming back to white balance once again. I see so much poor and compromised color from this that I would like to help digital photographers better understand and use white balance.

White balance is something I have worked with for nearly 30 years. How can that be when digital photography is not that old? White balance started with video and I first started shooting video in about 1979 — video was always white balanced. We always did it manually (actually white balancing off of a white card — which still works), even though it could be changed later in the edit suite. It was a workflow issue. Set white balance correctly in the first place, and there is less work later (plus it meant concentrating on other things than white balance).

It is important to understand that all images have a white balance setting attached to them, including RAW. If you are not choosing a specific white balance, you are using AWB regardless if you are shooting RAW or not. AWB will be the color setting that comes into Adobe Camera Raw, Lightroom or any other RAW conversion program with the “as shot” default. Camera Raw, Lightroom, etc., recognize whatever white balance the camera set (whether AWB or one you chose). When you choose a white balance setting from that drop down list, you are not getting the camera manufacturer’s white balance controls, even though they have similar names. You are getting Adobe color interpretations of the data in your image file.

By not setting white balance on site, you are adding an extra step to your workflow. I do very little adjustment of white balance in the computer (I shoot RAW) because I usually have the right white balance from the start. In addition, I so very, very often see a color bias in student shots that I cannot recommend AWB for serious shooting outdoors, regardless if you shoot RAW or not. What happens is that you are now adjusting based on a “standard” that is already biased (i.e., all of your images from a shoot).

AWB is inconsistent and generally gives a compromised color compared to choosing a specific white balance setting. While this can be adjusted in RAW, so very often I see this is not done so I know people are adjusting “blindly”, i.e., not based on the scene, but on what they see on screen. When AWB is inconsistent, then which photo do you choose as correct? And if the only reference you have to what is correct is the AWB “as shot”, and it is inconsistent and with poor color, you cannot expect to get the best color in the end.

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Digital camera techniques, Lightroom, Photoshop | 4 Comments »