As I wrote this it went from a quick and simple post into one that’s too big for a single post so I’m going to spilt this into 2 posts. Part 2 will come tomorrow.
Part 1
With that headline all of the engineers and matamaticians out there must be thinking I’ve gone off the deep end. Well of course we’re not breaking the Laws of Physics because …. well …. because they are the Laws of Physics and cannot be broken. This is simply a way of organizing three somewhat disparate digital photography techniques into one bucket. So it’s not so much a tip or anything that you can use directly but simply a different way of thinking of things.
Back in film days, before desk top scanners, there were four areas that photographers were limited in by the physics of light and lenses. They struggled to overcome these limitations:
- Image Detail (Resolution)
- Angle of View
- Dynamic Range
- Depth of Field
Read the rest of this entry »
In Part 1 of this series on White Balance we defined WB and in Part 2 talked about using WB to control the colors in our images. If the WB setting matches the color temperature of the light hitting our scene we would get accurate rendering of the colors in the scene. And if the camera WB setting did not match the color temperature of our light source the image would be rendered with a color cast. And that as creative we photographers sometimes want to purposely shift the colors in the image to control the emotional content of the image.
You may have noticed that in Part 1 the example images had the WB set at the time of capture and that the example images in Part 2 had the WB adjusted during post processing (during the raw conversion step). This leads to the question, “What is the best time to set WB and are there any advantages to doing it during capture or in post production?” The answer is that it depends on the file format you are capturing your images in, jpg or raw. But before we answer the question lets take a look at the differences between jpg files and raw files. Read the rest of this entry »
In the first part of this series on White Balance we learned that the look, feel, and/or mood on an image can be changed by using different WB settings. Here are three different versions of the same image:
The original is a raw file shot with the camera’s WB set to Auto. The center version was converted from the raw file using a setting of “As Shot”. And this pretty much matches the gray color of the overcast day when this image was made. The other two are from the same raw file but the one on the left had a much cooler WB set and the one on the right had a much warmer WB set during conversion. These images all have a different mood to them. So you may ask, which one is correct?
When it comes to selecting a WB there are two very different strategies or approaches that can be followed: Read the rest of this entry »
The color of light is measured by it’s color temperature. Outdoors, ambient light changes color temperature throughout the day. It is warmer (yellower) before sunset and just after sunrise. In the open shade of mid-day it is cooler (bluish).
Our eyes compensate pretty quickly for different color temperatures. A piece of white paper will appear white to us when viewed in either warm or cool lighting conditions. However, the sensor in our cameras, left on its own, is not so lucky. A picture of a piece of white paper taken in open shade will render quite bluish; while another picture of the same piece of white paper, taken near sunset, will be rendered yellowish. Read the rest of this entry »
