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Photography Question 

Amanda R. Milam 		 

Help with color!


 
 
I recently purchased a Canon 40D with the 28-135 IS lens. I talked a friend of mine into letting me take her pictures yesterday. I really need help with the color. The images below are the original images stright from the camera. It always seems that the lighting on the LCD screen looks almost perfect, but when they are printed, they are really dark and the color looks dull. How do I get the vibrant color that I see here at BetterPhoto?


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October 02, 2007

 

William Schuette 		  Amanda, it depends on the mode in which you are shooting. The LCD displays a thumbnail jpeg. This jpeg has some default saturation, sharpening and hue adjustments made by the camera's processor. If you are shooting raw, no adjustments are made by the camera to the file. You have to make those in your raw converter. if you are shooting jpeg check what your defaults are for saturation, contrast, sharpening, etc.

Bill


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October 02, 2007

 

Amanda R. Milam 		  It looks as if everything is set in the middle. Should I bump them up alittle? The only one that's not in the middle is the sharpness and it's more to the left.


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October 02, 2007

 

Richard Lynch 		 
 
 
The first thing you really want to do is get the best capture. This means watching not just lighting, but the color of light, direction, and exposure. Part of the problem here is white balance.

Another thing you can do is enhance your images in post-processing. Just like you might control an image in the darkroom, you can adjust to some extent for exposure, light color, saturation, etc.

I took a quick swing at this one with simple adjustments I teach in my courses, like Levels correction, color balance, hue/saturation, soft focus, some cloning and contrast enhancement. That is to say, you can get quite a lot more from these images with the proper techniques. I can't do as much as I'd like as I am limited by the resolution of the uploaded image (JPEG compression and resolution), but perhaps this shows some of what is possible as far as post-processing improvements.


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October 02, 2007

 
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