Color of a rose...
Color of a rose...
- Subject: Color of a rose...
- From: Sean <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 3 Jun 2009 15:21:28 -0400 (EDT)
Hello all,
First thanks for this great list. I'm a photographer in the Los Angeles area and I joined this list a few weeks ago in the hope of improving my knowledge of color in general, and particularly color as it relates to my photography. So far, mission accomplished! The archives are a treasure trove.
I would really like to hear your thoughts on rendering red flowers (first on monitors).
Recently I've been doing some camera tests to suss out the limitations. For the test, I'm using a Nikon D3, and processing my exposures with either photomatix or ACR. I have not calibrated the D3, but I am viewing on a calibrated NEC 2690. Debayering or HDR is done into 16 bit ProphotoRGB.
Here's the rub: A rose will render on the NEC (or cinema display) to a kind of deep orang-ish red, rather than to the deeeep (almost purple-ish) red I see when I look at the roses in the real world. Now, it's pretty obvious that when shooting most objects for non scientific/non archival purposes the goal is - for me anyway - more of an artistic interpretation of the color than a strict (spectroscopic?) reproduction of it. And that approach works very well in general for most subjects that I shoot (flesh-tones, landscapes, music venues).
Roses are a bitch.
Okay, so here's my thoughts.
Flower: I don't really know much about flowers, but I imagine that part of what makes a rose so spectacularly red is possibly due to florescence. I'm not putting any filtration on my glass (in this case a Nikkor 17-35) but my guess is that by the time the light hits the infrared filter on the sensor much of the "real world" chromatic information has already been altered quite a bit. (I do plan on picking up an achromatic lens for this flower project going forward...)
Camera: other than the fact that the camera has relatively fewer red filtered photosensors I would imagine that potentially, both the infra red filter, and the red photosensor filters combine to have a cutoff that simply blocks out the reds I'm looking for. Also the red channel is quick to clip which is why I am experimenting with HDR. The benefits of local contrast doesn't hurt here either.
ACR: perhaps this is more an issue of debayering than the inherent ability of the sensor. I only understand debayering in a very basic way, but it seems to me that companies like Nikon would be inclined to tweak their algorithms so that they're optimized for "general photography" (e.g. photographing people). To that end I would think skin tones would be a priority - which (I don't know) might explain the orange-ish rendering of roses? - just guessing here.
Monitors: The NEC is a great monitor. I'm happy with it under most conditions and it renders colors beautifully to my eye so I won't be spending 6 or 12 grande on anything "better". Though I'm sure better exists. That said my final guess here is that my monitor (like most monitors for that matter) simply can't reproduce the reds that I'm looking for.
So - the question is: is it possible to render the reds in a rose on a monitor any better? I did a quick search for "rose" on google and the resulting images confirm my observations; it's not just me! I guess I'm relieved (sort of), but the artist in me is picky. ;) The hue of the roses on google is that same kind of orange-ish red - again - when compared to the real thing... If I rest my eyes and don't look at the real thing for a while my interpretation is good. I like it. But I want better! :)
Thoughts? Am I going down the rabbit hole here? Is it possible to profile a rose petal (perhaps using my X-rit spectrophotometer?) To nail down what it's doing chromatically? So that then I could at least quantify the limitation here - to see where the rose exceeds my devices capabilities?
Sorry for the length of this post, and thanks for reading.
Regards,
Sean
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