What could have been done differently

Luke

Legend
Location
Milwaukee, WI USA
Name
Luke
How can I avoid the crazy color fringing here. I know stopping down the lens would have helped....I guess f2.8 is out for trees against a bright sky. I had to overexpose a bit also, to keep the details in the statue which of course blows out the sky. Does this exacerbate the problem?
What would you have done differently?
7692726394_c055818879_b.jpg

DSCF1003 by Lukinosity, on Flickr

Is this "just the way it's going to be"? If there's no way around it, I can shoot a couple different exposures and one exposed for the horse and one exposed for a blue sky and blend them in Photoshop. I wouldn't do it for this shot.....It's not special in any way to me..... I'm just out and about taking shots. But there will come a day when I'm shooting something that matters and there's going to be a tree against a bright sky and I'll want to get it right.

In the meantime, I just removed the color blue in Lightroom. It's kind of cheating, but the fringing is OUT OF CONTROL!

7692725932_fb1389d6c7_b.jpg

DSCF1009 by Lukinosity, on Flickr
 
Just for jollies, Luke... shoot with the sky properly exposed and then, in post production, see what you get when you pull the statue up from the shadows. It may be there won't be too much noise there. You can usually save underexposed areas of an image but you can't bring back blown highlights. In this case, you've blown highlights on the statue as well as the sky. The fringing can very well be a lens issue but overexposure doesn't help, either. It might help to shoot the exact same scene repeatedly with each image stopped down a step. Which camera are you using? If it has small sensor, I'd stop at about f/8. You can always reduce exposure compensation at that point as well. Let us know what kind of results you get. One other suggestion: How about trying it with flash?
 
I don't think the 9-18 opens up to 2.8 :D

I agree with Biro, I'd have spotted the sky and hoped I could bring something back in PP for the statue. Depends on how noisy the sensor is - would be a hopeless case on the E-P2, but maybe not on an APS or an XP1

Which version of LR are you using ? LR 4.1 has some very good CA and fringing control too
 
Regarding the shooting, indeed bracketing or flash would be my preferred options.
Regarding the Lightroom work, it looks like you just took down the blue curve a whole lot? I think you'd have much better results desaturating the blue (or cyan) colours in the HSV tab, as that leaves all the other colours alone. Or try the fringing removal tool, although to be honest I'm not that enthusiastic about it yet (didn't really do what I wanted it to on the one occasion I tried it).

By the way, regarding the desaturating in HSV thing, RawTherapee has a neat trick where you can adjust the width of each hue group, so you can desaturate only the precise hue of blue that's bothering you, while leaving other hues of blue alone (or at least affecting them less). In this image I don't think it'd make a lot of difference, but if there'd also be a blue object in the photo that you didn't want to desaturate, that might be a solution.
 
How can I avoid the crazy color fringing here. I know stopping down the lens would have helped....I guess f2.8 is out for trees against a bright sky. I had to overexpose a bit also, to keep the details in the statue which of course blows out the sky. Does this exacerbate the problem?
What would you have done differently?

I'd get a polarizer if possible..

In lieu of that I would have exposed for the sky and then an exposure compensation.. maybe up to a full stop to lighten [depends on histo/eyeballing it].. and after I would bring out what shadows were left in pp.

Also could use flash fill..
 
I guess I would have also tried exposing for the sky and filling with flash from front. Don't know how natural it would actually look, though.

But now that the deed is already done, all that rest is playing in PP:
LUKE_BWX.jpg
Join to see EXIF info for this image (if available)

Hope you don't mind messing with your image, Luke. Of course I'll take it down if you do.
 
It's funny that my gut instinct (to expose for the subject) led me so far astray here. Maybe if I had just let the camera do it's job and stayed out of the way.....

Thanks all for your input. We'll see how long this knowledge stays in my head. I like that mono treatment there too. Any of images can be played with and re-shared. If I ever get good enough that they can't be, I'll let you know.
 
Back
Top