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We had dinner at a friends house recently and as is my want I took my camera and just the 50mm. Their backyard faces due west and they have what amounts to a large wall of glass windows facing west off their living room. As the sun was dipping to the horizon the room was bathed in a flood of orange golden light that just made everything glow. My daughters were playing a game of noughts and crosses so I reeled off a few candid captures - thoughts appreciated...

I prefer the second photograph. The first one
seems you have reduced a bit too much and
the subject appears on my screen with some
discoloration on the face. If you took them in
RAW, I would play with them a bit to make the
skin colour a bit more natural.

zafra52 wrote:I prefer the second photograph. The first one
seems you have reduced a bit too much and
the subject appears on my screen with some
discoloration on the face. If you took them in
RAW, I would play with them a bit to make the
skin colour a bit more natural.

This is a predicament unto itself. If i get a shot in natural, late afternoon light, light that will definitely have an orange to red tone, isn't that actually the natural skin tone for late afternoon sunlight?

I did an outdoor shot last week at 6.30 pm for a particular story which had the natural red skin tones for that time of day. However, i altered the colour cast to avoid lay people scratching their heads in wondering why it looked so warm/red and thinking i was incompetent.

Another instance is when i've frequently shot a landscape and up here the sunset/late afternoon light tones are amplified by the brilliant clear sky, red soil and absolutely flat landscape. To a layperson they may look artificially accentuated and unnatural, when in fact they haven't been touched. Even late afternoon sports shots have a very warm tone. If they didn't it wouldn't be late afternoon.

So, in a nutshell, do we ignore our beautiful late afternoon hues and alter them to look cooler and 'natural' according to our preconceptions of how something should look regardless of time of day or do we actually appreciate what we have and recognise it as being in fact, quite natural?

Not having a go at anyone mind you, it's just something i hear so often and think to myself, 'hang on, that is natural and we can all see that for ourselves on any clear and sunny late afternoon.

Hey Rodney, I think the second image really highlights a common issue with the D7000 and to a lesser extent all digital cameras - I have found the skin tones and sunrise yellows often look a bit whacked in the D7000 and once realising the fact that it is over exposing the RED channel I have worked around it, much like I did with the D80 which consistently over exposed...every channel..

I have long banged on about the yellows being blown and early on i adopted the same stance as I did with teh D80, if using a mode other than manual always dial in -0.5 or -1.0 exposure compensation, this will often give a slightly under exposed image in most cases but preserves the highlights and more importantly preserves the RED channel which is the most susceptible to being blown, more so than the blue and green. once that RED channel clows the skin tones always look a bit too pinkish.

Looking at your second image even with out the histogram I can immediately tell its a D7000 over exposing taking your image into PP and checking the histogram shows the red channel fully clipped, selecting the histogram you can see what parts of the image are affected and no surprise its the areas which 'look' un-natural.

ie.

blown high lights




and the specific red channel and the image areas affected




now, what can you do about it? i find images which get the RED channel clipped adjusting the exposure on teh raw to 1/2-1 stop under and then using d-lighting or shadow recovery works very well to return the image to a having more natural skin tones.

in teh case of teh jpeg, i did a simple brightness dial down, control point to rduce the red channel just a fraction (-2) then a sligth bump in the contrast, a subtle but more pleasant skin tone imo.

That first red clipping image reminds me of Louis Armstrong!

Thanks guys - and thanks Gerry for the very detailed comments (and pictures none the less )...

To explain my original processing steps I essentially did what norwest said and basically dialled back the as shot WB to make it less orange and more "normal" but the original conditions and the original image was quite red/orange; cranked down the highlight recovery and a touch of negative clarity and did a tiny bit of localised adjustment on the face to remove a bit more magenta.

Gerry - here is the original RAW's histogram (note there's no clipping in any channel in the full RAW except a tiny tiny spot on the bottom right corner - and it was shot at 0EV) then converted straight to jpeg - note that the jpeg conversion looks more blown than the RAW does in Lightroom on my screen - in fact I think the jpeg viewed just on my computer looks ever so slightly better than the same one in my browser window.

Original RAW Histogram (in Lightroom)


I guess this is the difference in DR from the 14bit RAW compared to the 8bit JPEG conversion...

Original Image (SOOC)


I then followed Gerry's suggestions - in this case a -1EV exposure adjustment followed by +90 on shadows (globally), a speck of highlight recovery and a speck of contrast and negative clarity



Then I did what I did the first time to the WB and cooled it (and took a speck of the magenta out) - which as norwest says makes it look less like it did at the time but more "natural" looking - as norwest says this is a fine line - do we make it "real" or more what the viewer is expecting?



NB: I'm not surprised there are slits of bright light happening - there were very light fabric vertical drapes behind me on the windows.

Thoughts?

It's interesting to see that there is a color shift (in the red channel) when you converted your image. Is that what's happened?

surenj wrote:It's interesting to see that there is a color shift (in the red channel) when you converted your image. Is that what's happened?

When I compare the RAW histogram to the JPEG histogram (same image) it looks like the blue stayed about the same place and the green may have moved slightly to the right but yes it looks like red/yellow moved a lot to the right.

NB: I'm just comparing the histogram I posted (from Lightroom) vs what I see with the EXIF Viewer Google Chrome extension (which by the way is excellent - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/deta ... abpnfokmnl) output when I click on the SOOC JPEG image below it.

Hey Rodney,

I reckon this is unacceptable. Is this LR4 doing the JPEG conversion? An assymetric color shift on merely converting an image really messes with your mind (and the image). There is something not quite right.....

How about the color space? Is it the same? [although I can't see how this would influence matters]

surenj wrote:I reckon this is unacceptable. Is this LR4 doing the JPEG conversion? An assymetric color shift on merely converting an image really messes with your mind (and the image). There is something not quite right.....How about the color space? Is it the same? [although I can't see how this would influence matters]

Yep LR4 - although the histogram of the RAW is in Lightroom but the histogram of the JPEG is an EXIF Viewer plugin in my web browser (Google Chrome). We are of course converting from a colour spaceless 14bit RAW to an sRGB 8bit JPEG so somethings going to happen