Jul 04 2008
pictures
I have no idea what I’m doing with my camera.
Robin points out that I should put the thing on P, ISO 100, and go outside and learn how to compose photos. I’ll get around to this. For the moment, I’ve had the camera for about two days, and I’ve had limited opportunity to use it. I did take it to dinner last night; a bunch (like, twenty) of Olin students gathered for dinner at Vinnie T’s, and I joined. It was tasty, and it was fun to see so many people I knew.
What amazed me about shooting at 8MP RAW was what could be done after the picture was taken. Vinnie T’s was very orange. Everything had a yellow/orange/red cast to it.
Last night, I downloaded a beta of Adobe’s Lightroom 2.0. This is kinda like iPhoto on steroids. The above picture was taken by Nik while he was poking around with the camera; nothing he did on the shot could have compensated for the lighting in the restaurant. (At least, I don’t think you can easily compensate for that kind of lighting at the moment that you want to take the picture.)
After playing with the hue, saturation, and luminosity across the entire color space, I came up with something vaguely human looking:
To me, this kind of technology is freaking magic. Of course, I have no idea what I’m actually doing. I mean, I have a rough understanding of color theory, and can make some sense of what the color curves in Lightroom mean, but mostly, I’m just looking at the photo, looking at the sliders, and moving them to reflect where I think I want that particular color to “go.” I assume someone who really knows what they’re doing could look at the “before” picture and see a path through the color space to a more natural coloration—but I don’t have that ability at this point.
Back to packing.
I actually liked the “orange” one.
Yeah, I agree with “this technology is freaking magic”. I spent years with film, terrified to shoot in fluorescent light (and don’t even get me started on slides) because it does such horrible things to color balance… that you CAN’T FIX. I mean, you can sorta fix it in the darkroom, but not really.
Enter digital imaging and RAW. Bits are awesome.
Now… I’m surprised that you’re hacking around with HSL. I haven’t played with LR 2.0, but in LR 1, the very top control in the Develop module is “White Balance”… and that puppy does awesome things. LR’s “Auto White Balance” is usually very good, especially if there’s a human face in the pic. But perhaps I misunderstand… did you fiddle with that first, then resort to HSL for further improvement?
Final note: the 20D lets you set the white balance in camera. This is mostly irrelevant for RAW, and so I always use Auto… but if you’re shooting JPEG, then it’s critical to get WB right in camera, because so much of the sensor data is thrown away. Usually, there’s settings for Tungsten, Daylight, Fluorescent, etc, along with a “custom” setting.
“Custom” is cool. You can grab the exact WB setting for (e.g.) an orange-lit restaurant by holding up something white/grey (e.g., a piece of paper), taking a picture (make sure it fills the frame), and then telling the “custom” function to use that as its definition of white. Magic!!
I finally read the manual last night; unless I have time, it seems like the in-camera magic is a lot of juju to remember and get right. That said, it may be useful sometime.
(Mostly, this post is to test whether or not messages are being sent to me when someone posts a comment… something seems broken since the move to a new host/updated version of WP.)
Fun stuff, eh? I’ve had my DSLR for ~9 months now, and have quickly filled up my hard drive with those huge raw files. *So* much data in there; but so much data to store, later! My recent efforts: http://flickr.com/photos/32738956@N00/
Mmm, color spaces.
Looks like Vinny T’s is even worse on the orange and yellow than Olin is [tried taking pictures inside the Auditorium? it's horrific].
@Niki: Aye. It was pretty rough. What’s funny is that Leslie had to come over and teach me how to use Lightroom—I was fixing color by adjusting all the small, fiddly sliders.
@Nori: I love the pics. I’ll have to send you a link to where I’m keeping mine. I’m not yet sure if I’m going to make my photostream *completely* public. Some might be, some might not.
Given that I’ve taken a number of pictures of people with their newborns lately, I’m not sure how they’d feel about those pictures being completely “public.” I may set up a Flickr stream or something similar for things that I can share without concern.