Some reworked images

Images of undisturbed subjects in their natural environment. All subject types.

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gardenersassistant
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Post by gardenersassistant »

gardenersassistant wrote:
Howard Mayo wrote:The first three shots of this post I find a little on the yellow side and i'm curious to know if it's just me.
Thanks.

You are right about the yellows. They are horrible. The Choisya bush the insects were on gives me endless problems with colours for some reason. Certainly with the first of those, and possibly the others I don't recall, at least the red channel and possibly more was clipping badly. I pulled the exposure and the highlights down, and tried bringing the yellows down too, but very briefly, and very ineffective, and I gave up quickly as the reprocessing was a bit of a side issue and I didn't want to get bogged down with it. And it was the sharpness/detail/clarity that I was concentrating on. (I've started being much more careful about white balance with my flowers etc, using a grey card to set the white balance scene by scene (ish), with pleasing results. I think it is time I did the same with invertebrates.)

I think your Photoshop one is nearest to the reality, although tbh the colours are hugely varied on that bush, not just as the season moves on, but from leaf to leaf at a particular point in time, so it's difficult to know what the colours actually were for any particular capture.
I had another go at those three, taking my time, being more careful about it, more hand crafting, less automation. The second one looks like one of the colours I actually see in those leaves. I think there is some complicated (real world) green colour casting going on with the other two, especially the third one. But even if they aren't correct they don't feel as objectionable as the ones in the top post to me.

Thanks for your help with this. It is so very helpful to get substantive feedback.

Image
1443 C 01 0501 P1030648_PLab LR 1024w by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

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1443 C 02 0501 P1030744_PLab LR 1024w by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

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1443 C 03 0501 P1040059_PLab LR 1024w by gardenersassistant, on Flickr
Nick

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Rework and reposts of my images posted in this forum are always welcome, especially if they come with an explanation of what you did and how you did it.

Lou Jost
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Post by Lou Jost »

I just looked at your DPreview posts and some of the comments. Those are really nicely done. Your approach was very fair and objective, in spite of what some commenters claimed.

ChrisR
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Post by ChrisR »

To me those rewworked pictures look right for colour.

The situation is analogous to a photo of a snooker player stetched across the table. He has a ghoulish green face from the reflection of the baize.
It looks wrong, but it's still wrong if you remove all the green cast. A hint of it is what my eye/brain conveys when I look at the real scene.


A lens just arrived which I notice has an iris which adjusts well below the minimum marked aperture; I am moved to see what I can do with a picture at f/tiny from other than microscopically close. I commented before on the tiny effective aperture of Nick's camera and asked about his post processing - which turned out to be complex.
I think that for whatever reason, I haven't been able to get the sharpness Nick does. It may be clever tools, but I expect clever user has a larger impact. :?
Chris R

gardenersassistant
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Post by gardenersassistant »

Lou Jost wrote:I got the diffuser idea from Andreas Kay. He has used ridiculously simple cameras and lighting to get astounding invertebrate photos in Ecuador's tropical forests:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/andreaskay/
Many of these incredible images of rare (and sometimes new to science) organisms were taken with acheap little point-and shoot pocket camera fitted with a plastic tube holding a Raynox + diffuser.
Thanks for the link. Great variety there, and some wonderfully odd-looking animals amongst them. Like you say, you can do a lot with some quite basic equipment.
Nick

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Rework and reposts of my images posted in this forum are always welcome, especially if they come with an explanation of what you did and how you did it.

gardenersassistant
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Joined: Sun May 31, 2009 5:21 am
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Post by gardenersassistant »

Lou Jost wrote:I just looked at your DPreview posts and some of the comments. Those are really nicely done. Your approach was very fair and objective, in spite of what some commenters claimed.
Thanks I'm agnostic about kit - formats, brands, models - and software and techniques. I prefer to go for an evidence-based approach. I don't relate to the "religious wars" over at dpreview, but some of the people there are very knowledgeable and I learn useful things from time to time, including sometimes even in the midst of an acrimonious argument that is swirling around the interesting stuff.

My "try it and see" approach has led me to use some things that "everyone knows" don't work/aren't worth using: for invertebrates, very small apertures (diffraction), autofocus ("doesn't work for macro"), close-up lenses on bridge and interchangeable telezooms ("extra glass on top of not very good glass, never going to deliver decent results") rather than proper, high quality prime macro optics and bigger, better sensors, manual flash rather than TTL metering, doing very large numbers of captures in a session, often many of the same subject, in the same position, to as to improve the chance of getting one that works ("spray and pray").

And I think my post processing, which I see as a key factor for my invertebrate images, appears more complicated than most people want to contemplate.

And for botanical subjects, often working hand-held for stacking captures out in the field, using video (and hence JPEG) for stacking rather than doing it properly with raw and focus bracketing, doing stacking captures in breezy conditions, and when I use a tripod keeping my hands on the camera rather than using a remote or timed release, and lifting one or two tripod legs off the ground to get at awkwardly placed subjects. And for single-image botanical captures, using aperture bracketing (which involves ISO/noise compromises) so I can work fast out in the field and cover lots of subjects, and choose the relationship between subject coverage and background rendition at leisure during post processing rather than trying to work it out in the field (more "spray and pray", "monkeys and typewriters" etc).

I've been called out on most of these, with some rather snide comments sometimes about how if I used "proper kit" or if I "understood the basics of photography" then I wouldn't have this or that mistaken notion and might eventually get some half-decent photos if I did things properly, learnt some stuff and practised a lot. I generally find that posting an example or two either ends the discussion or, perhaps more often, gets the goalposts moved. :)

In contrast, this forum seems very civilised. Lots of deep knowledge too, but much of it concerns higher magnification working that I don't do and of which I don't understand the terminology. So it all goes over my head I'm afraid.
Nick

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Rework and reposts of my images posted in this forum are always welcome, especially if they come with an explanation of what you did and how you did it.

gardenersassistant
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Post by gardenersassistant »

ChrisR wrote:To me those rewworked pictures look right for colour.
Useful feedback. Thanks Chris.
ChrisR wrote:The situation is analogous to a photo of a snooker player stetched across the table. He has a ghoulish green face from the reflection of the baize.
It looks wrong, but it's still wrong if you remove all the green cast. A hint of it is what my eye/brain conveys when I look at the real scene.
Yes, I had a discussion a while ago about colour casts and whether people would want to remove them. I don't, but some people do. It seems to me though that in complicated cases where the casting varies in different areas of the image that could be very, very difficult to do well. I wouldn't want to bother anyway because if the cast was real then I'm content for it to be in my photos. However, as i think you may have implied, photos do (IMO at least) have a way of hyping up such differences. I notice this particularly with sunsets after the sun has gone down and the colours in the sky are getting very muted, but in photos, even without pushing saturation, contrast in the slightest, the colours look much stronger and sometimes quite dramatic. That's an interesting case in my mind for "let it be or correct it" consideration. I have to say that given my "pretty picture" mentality and my visual tastes, I tend to leave it. Pulling it back to match the reality could turn them into rather dull and unmemorable images. Recording reality? Not my thing really.
ChrisR wrote:A lens just arrived which I notice has an iris which adjusts well below the minimum marked aperture; I am moved to see what I can do with a picture at f/tiny from other than microscopically close.
I would be very interested to see how that goes. It's a subject close to my heart.
ChrisR wrote:I commented before on the tiny effective aperture of Nick's camera and asked about his post processing - which turned out to be complex.
I actually simplified it for those reworks. During the exercise I'm doing (before these latest three re-reworks) I had worked out that I should take the Silkypix sharpening out of the workflow as it was causing problems, especially when I subsequently resized images. For these three corrective reworks I took Silkypix out of the workflow entirely (all it was doing at that stage was pulling highlights down), and did some initial image-specific adjustments in PhotoLab, so the workflow was PhotoLab -> DNG -> Lightroom (which incidentally gives me finer grained white balance control in Lightroom in the finishing stages compared to taking in TIFF from Silkypix.
ChrisR wrote:I think that for whatever reason, I haven't been able to get the sharpness Nick does. It may be clever tools, but I expect clever user has a larger impact. :?
Interesting question. If you would like to upload a raw file or two here at Dropox we could probe that a bit. If so, it would be helpful to have a processed version too so we can compare the JPEG outputs. Whatever the outcome (I have failed miserably sometimes with these exercises, and other times it has been good), I would be happy to explain what I tried. (Very selfish motivation here - I learn a lot from exercises like this and discussions of the outputs, especially when it involves the nitty gritty details of what we are variously seeing and how we are reacting/liking/or not about what we are seeing.)
Nick

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Blog
Journey since 2007

Rework and reposts of my images posted in this forum are always welcome, especially if they come with an explanation of what you did and how you did it.

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