 Colleen Farrell |
Problems Shooting Red Flowers Hi, I'm having trouble shooting flowers that are uniformly red. Right now, I'm trying to photograph cyclamens. All the detail is lost, no matter what I do. I have varied the exposure many ways, and the most variation I ever get is occasional blown-out portions of the petals. It's very weird!
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- Carlton Ward Contact Carlton Ward Carlton Ward's Gallery |
Your Wrinkly Wrose picture looks very nice. Are you having problems with the edges of the flower being undefined? Red seems a difficult color for me as well, but I would try different lighting techniques since you have tried varying your Depth of Field. Maybe a softer light angled to the side a bit and a longer exposure would bring out the detail. Good Luck - you take very nice flower photos.
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Mark Feldstein |
Since it appears your highlights are getting blown out, instead of maneuvering your lights, try tenting your subject with one grade or another of a translucent panel, and then set your lighting to shoot through the panel. Of course, this may be the different lighting effect that Carlton was referring to. Mark
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Colleen Farrell |
Thanks, Mark and Carlton for the tips (and the compliment!). I'd forgotten about the "wrinkly wrose" -that was shot outside. I'm trying to photograph the cyclamens indoors with sunlight coming through a window covered with diffuser material, so I'll try variations on that. Thanks again!
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Colleen Farrell |
Hi Howie, I did read something on the web about how the sensors of digital cameras struggle if confronted with subjects that are very close to pure primary colors, particularly red. But in the article, it said few subjects are that close to pure red, so I was wondering if there was something else I was doing wrong. I'll look for the book you mention--thanks!
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Mark Feldstein |
Photoshop, Shmotshop. If you shoot it right, you won't have to fix anything and tenting, along with taking an incident exposure meter reading under the tent, are the two necessary steps to shooting it right. And those steps, in turn, if followed, make dinking around with it in photoshop unnecessary...unless of course, you're trying to improve on nature itself, and if so, you're probably not shooting it right. So....here we go again. Now, get the picture? M.
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Andreas G. Karelias |
This is a known problem with bright red objects in general. There is one way to solve the problem is Photoshop. What you need to do is to "borrow" some details from the green and/or channel, and convey it to the red channel. The technique is as follows: a) Open your image and create a Channel Mixer adjustment layer. b) In the "Red" dialog box that will apear, red will be at 100%, greena dn blue at 0%. Reduce red to 70-80%, and increase green to 10-20%, so that both together add up to a 100%. c) In most cases this will solve your problem. If your image appears too dark, you can start increasing the red and the green sliders gradually, so that their sum is higher than 100%, until you are satisfied. There is a trade off in this technique, in the sense that your image will not look exactly as it was supposed to look, but will look a lot better than having red clipped areas. I hope this helps. Regards - Andreas
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Colleen Farrell |
Thanks, Andreas! I only have Photoshop Elements (and version 2.0, yet), and there is no "channel mixer" adjustment layer ... but it looks like this is something I could change in "levels" maybe? If it isn't a "fatal flaw" of digital cameras, I would just as soon work it out with my lighting, but it sounds like it is.
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rrr S. rrr |
How about backlighting? Or internal lighting with maybe some fiber optic lights? Are the petals thin enough to let some light through and pick up detail that way?
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Mark Feldstein |
Well Andreas, where I went to photographic school, we learned how to photograph, on film, to capture the detail she's looking for not fix it. Besides, if the pixels can't record it in the first instance, how can you fix it later without spending all the time to do it when, like I said initially, she just ought to learn how to shoot it right. The involves "controlling" the lighting, not fixing it after the fact. As far as backlighting as Colleen suggested, that's tough to do unless you first have all the equipment, scrims, flags, cutters and gobos, necessary to control the spill of light from behind the flowers back into the lens. Very tough to do. And as far as fiber optics, while Beverly has an interesting idea I think you need to be concerned about color shifting of the lamps you use and the final color rendering and fixing that in PS. Also, you've kind of got the same problem as spillover and backsplash into the lens. If you tent what you're shooting, pretend your light source is the sun and adjust it's brightness level, you'll see plenty of detail (and whether your digital camera can record that level of detail is a different story). And THEN before you crank your lighting intensity up or down from your initial level, add some fill cards, reflectors to move your light around into various areas of the scene, like SHADOW areas, OR use dark fill cards to help darken brighter areas. Also, you need an accurate exposure meter, not in the camera but a separate hand-held meter that will let you take incident readings from the different parts of the scene. A spot meter would be even better for this type of work, even one built-in to your camera if you've got one. The basic premise Colleen is to be able to control the light. Brightness will wash out details. Tenting controls direct brightness. Shadows will cast details into nothingness. To balance the two, shadows and highlights, you control the intensity and where the light is going by measuring it in gradations. I shoot a lot of agricultural work, flower and vegetables for commercial growers and seed companies both in the studio and the field in Salinas Valley Calif. I use film for that. But then, what do I know.
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Mark Feldstein |
When I say control the light, I mean like this, btw. http://www.feldstein-photo.net/-/feldstein-photo/gallery.php?cat=39384&pID=1&row=15 ;>) Mark
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Rob Zuidema |
That being said, my very first finalist here at BP was of a red rose. No fancy meters or lights were used. Simply placed the bouqet on the coffee table in front of the living room window with the morning sun coming through the sheers. Then turned the vase around slowly until the light and shadows looked right and positioned the tripod and camera accordingly. A narrow aperture and long exposure gave me the detail I was looking for. A wide aperture with quick shutter resulted in detail being lost. The only processing in photoshop was cloning out a bright spot in the background, a slight crop, and a bit of sharpening to counteract the upload to BP. Please bear in mind that I am just an amature like many folks here, and I rely greatly on trial and error, but I guess that's how I learn. It took me about 20-25 shots of the various roses in that vase to get 1 or 2 good shots. So, like many people here say, just keep on shooting. Rob.
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