My gray day histograms were not clipped. I bracketed each shot by half
stops and the middle one looked best on most shots. The histograms
generally were far from the shadow end, and the highlight end had a few
spikes from some of the white sky highlights but the meat of the curve
was centered. On most shots, I pushed up the exposure until the
histogram reached the right end and pushed the shadows until it
reached the lower end. I turned up the color temperature to 5850. Then
I increased saturation and contrast significantly. I used
shadows/highlights to mellow some of the gray sky reflections. Once I
had more color in these I burned them in. Then I increased red
saturation only another step. Finally, I adjusted contrast and
brightness a bit more. On some exposures I pulled back the green curve
a bit in the middle of the range. I posted one of these before. I'll
post the url again, along with a url for a conversion of the untouched
RAW image. The tweaked image is first, the untouched one second. In
addition to the steps outlined above, you'll see I had to remove some
parking lot concrete blocks, and I cropped out the sky. (That was
Annsan's suggestion. Thanks Ann:-) I did 16 shots for the magazine
article. I've printed four or five on the Epson 2200, and they look
very nice. That's usually an indication that they will print well on
offset four-color process after conversion to CMYK.
http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=2816809&size=lg
http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=2853243&size=lg
On Nov 5, 2004, at 2:06 AM, Rob Studdert wrote:
On 4 Nov 2004 at 23:03, Mishka wrote:
i guess "grey day" is the key here. that should be perfect for
digital --
you can fine-tune the histogram right on the spot, without risking
to lose either end of it.
The histogram only reflects the post processing setting in camera,
however it's
not a problem. If you looked at the example RAW file I posted the
other day you
will see that it was shot in near midday sun on a cloudless day. The
RAW file
clips only in an area of bright white and specular reflection and
there is
still good detail in the deep shadows. The range is well
under-utilized on drab
days, it's very difficult to make a bad exposure in such lighting.
Rob Studdert
HURSTVILLE AUSTRALIA
Tel +61-2-9554-4110
UTC(GMT) +10 Hours
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~distudio/publications/
Pentax user since 1986, PDMLer since 1998
