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Author Topic: Aoraki/Mt Cook, New Zealand  (Read 6972 times)

shadowblade

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Aoraki/Mt Cook, New Zealand
« on: April 26, 2016, 01:31:35 pm »

Aoraki/Mt Cook at sunset, with Lake Pukaki in the foreground.

Sony A7r with Canon 70-200L II
« Last Edit: April 30, 2016, 01:21:10 pm by shadowblade »
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Slobodan Blagojevic

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Re: Aoraki/Mt Cook, New Zealand
« Reply #1 on: April 26, 2016, 01:43:12 pm »

Dear Lord! I am usually a fan of your oversaturated approach, but too much is too much. This is a caricature of a landscape, even though a lot of people might like it as such.

shadowblade

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Re: Aoraki/Mt Cook, New Zealand
« Reply #2 on: April 26, 2016, 01:59:17 pm »

Dear Lord! I am usually a fan of your oversaturated approach, but too much is too much. This is a caricature of a landscape, even though a lot of people might like it as such.

Seems to print perfectly...
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Mark Lindquist

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Re: Aoraki/Mt Cook, New Zealand
« Reply #3 on: April 26, 2016, 02:42:23 pm »

Shadowblade, friend, just do a simple B+W conversion of this image exactly as you have it:

Image> Adjustments: Black and White

no other adjustments at all.... the over saturation is immediately apparent.

I hate to say it, because I think you have a good capture,

But I'm with Slobodan on this - it is pushed not just to the limit but over and beyond.

The mountains are gorgeous, bud.

Mark
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shadowblade

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Re: Aoraki/Mt Cook, New Zealand
« Reply #4 on: April 26, 2016, 02:47:34 pm »

Shadowblade, friend, just do a simple B+W conversion of this image exactly as you have it:

Image> Adjustments: Black and White

no other adjustments at all.... the over saturation is immediately apparent.

I hate to say it, because I think you have a good capture,

But I'm with Slobodan on this - it is pushed not just to the limit but over and beyond.

The mountains are gorgeous, bud.

Mark

Tried that - I think it looks awful in black-and-white. Not reflective of the place at all.

I also tried decreasing the saturation, but then it just looks washed-out.

Looks perfect in PS and in print, but oversaturated in web.

I'm starting to think I should never have moved to a wide-gamut monitor - ever since I got it, every single colour image I've posted on web has been reported as oversaturated or displaying some sort of colour shift, even if it's perfect in PS...
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Mark Lindquist

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Re: Aoraki/Mt Cook, New Zealand
« Reply #5 on: April 26, 2016, 03:03:23 pm »

Tried that - I think it looks awful in black-and-white. Not reflective of the place at all.

I also tried decreasing the saturation, but then it just looks washed-out.

Looks perfect in PS and in print, but oversaturated in web.

I'm starting to think I should never have moved to a wide-gamut monitor - ever since I got it, every single colour image I've posted on web has been reported as oversaturated or displaying some sort of colour shift, even if it's perfect in PS...

That would explain it.  I only meant for you to convert to B+W to see how everything is hopelessly clipped, I agree, the image should be in color.

How about this for an idea.  Keep your wide gamut monitor and  just put, say an apple 20" cinema display beside it.  Then you can view the images as they will look on the web, after srgb conversion.  Then you would have the best of both worlds.  Just do an adjustment for web using the cinema display.

The look I think you may have reminds me of 50's picture post cards - the good ones.

A shame it doesn't show well on the web.

Mark
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Eric Myrvaagnes

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Re: Aoraki/Mt Cook, New Zealand
« Reply #6 on: April 26, 2016, 03:46:03 pm »

I have to agree with Slobodan and Mark, especially Mark's suggestions.
I'd love to see this processed for the web.
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Jim Kasson

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Re: Aoraki/Mt Cook, New Zealand
« Reply #7 on: April 26, 2016, 03:57:33 pm »

A less-dramatic look at Mt. Cook:



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maddogmurph

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Re: Aoraki/Mt Cook, New Zealand
« Reply #8 on: April 26, 2016, 05:06:05 pm »

Looks like you need to go into photoshop and select those yellows, and hit the "tame" button. Also don't add any saturation or color to that lake. It looks unreal naturally, and doesn't need any help. The sky on the left looks smudgy. If you're going to add color, maybe consider doing it selectively using luminosity masks. Given that I know what this looks like these colors aren't balanced. But if you're going for artistic/surreal over-saturation painting like effect you've hit the mark solid. The only thing I'd say then is if you're going for surreal maybe increase the blue color in the shadows on the road as they are highly complimentary with that bright yello  ;D
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MattBurt

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Re: Aoraki/Mt Cook, New Zealand
« Reply #9 on: April 26, 2016, 06:14:44 pm »

Love the composition and scene but I agree it looks a bit overdone.
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Arlen

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Re: Aoraki/Mt Cook, New Zealand
« Reply #10 on: April 26, 2016, 08:53:53 pm »

It has the potential to be a beautiful scene.

The problem some of us are seeing with the totally unrealistic colors in the OP image is due to how some browsers (e.g., Chrome) handle color management when no color profile is embedded in the image, as is the case here.

With an untagged image, Chrome and some other browsers take the RGB values and use the full range of the device screen, making the assumption that the device has an approximately sRGB gamut. But on a wide gamut monitor, that assumption is false, and displaying them this way can result in wildly wrong colors. Other browsers, like Firefox, don't make the same assumption, and the displayed colors of untagged images look similar to sRGB tagged images even on wide gamut monitors.

So when I look at the OP image in Firefox, it appears closer to "reality" than in does when I view it in Chrome, on a calibrated and profiled wide gamut monitor running Windows 10.

Now if I take the OP image into Photoshop and assign it an sRGB profile, and then save it with the profile embedded, it looks the same in either Chrome or Firefox on a wide gamut monitor. See the two attached images, one with sRGB profile embedded and the other not embedded, in your favorite browsers.
(Note: you have to click on them to see the difference; the non-color-managed thumbnails may look the same.)

Take home message:  if you want to ensure that your image looks as close as possible to the way it does on your monitor, when viewed on a wide variety of other people's devices and browsers, then convert to sRGB and embed the color profile.


For more info and a way to test your browsers, see this site: Web Browser Color Management Test
« Last Edit: April 26, 2016, 09:13:04 pm by Arlen »
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shadowblade

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Re: Aoraki/Mt Cook, New Zealand
« Reply #11 on: April 27, 2016, 12:07:28 am »

That would explain it.  I only meant for you to convert to B+W to see how everything is hopelessly clipped, I agree, the image should be in color.

How about this for an idea.  Keep your wide gamut monitor and  just put, say an apple 20" cinema display beside it.  Then you can view the images as they will look on the web, after srgb conversion.  Then you would have the best of both worlds.  Just do an adjustment for web using the cinema display.

The look I think you may have reminds me of 50's picture post cards - the good ones.

A shame it doesn't show well on the web.

Mark

How does it look now?

I took a closer look at the sRGB image - it looked completely different to the Prophoto RGB version (and the Adobe RGB version), with all the yellows being clipped. All these were comfortably in gamut in Adobe RGB. I don't normally pay any attention to the sRGB version, beyond a simple relative colorimetric or perceptual conversion, since I only use it for the downsized web version; printing is done using Adobe RGB.

sRGB really is an awful colour space that should have become obsolete by now.

Anyway, applied a saturation mask to selectively reduce the saturation in these areas until the whole thing fits inside the sRGB gamut. Now it looks awful and washed-out on my displays (although sRGB always makes cyans/blues look awful) - how does it look on web?
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shadowblade

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Re: Aoraki/Mt Cook, New Zealand
« Reply #12 on: April 27, 2016, 12:11:04 am »

Looks like you need to go into photoshop and select those yellows, and hit the "tame" button. Also don't add any saturation or color to that lake. It looks unreal naturally, and doesn't need any help. The sky on the left looks smudgy. If you're going to add color, maybe consider doing it selectively using luminosity masks. Given that I know what this looks like these colors aren't balanced. But if you're going for artistic/surreal over-saturation painting like effect you've hit the mark solid. The only thing I'd say then is if you're going for surreal maybe increase the blue color in the shadows on the road as they are highly complimentary with that bright yello  ;D

I had actually desaturated the lake from the original file, since it was very close to blowing out even Adobe RGB, let alone sRGB (which is notoriously weak in the cyans).

I have another version, taken a few minutes later, after the sun had gone down (only hitting the peaks) that would have been much easier to process. But it doesn't have the strong, yellow side-lighting of this one, and the foreground was in a boring, uniform shadow by then.
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shadowblade

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Re: Aoraki/Mt Cook, New Zealand
« Reply #13 on: April 27, 2016, 12:21:24 am »

It has the potential to be a beautiful scene.

The problem some of us are seeing with the totally unrealistic colors in the OP image is due to how some browsers (e.g., Chrome) handle color management when no color profile is embedded in the image, as is the case here.

With an untagged image, Chrome and some other browsers take the RGB values and use the full range of the device screen, making the assumption that the device has an approximately sRGB gamut. But on a wide gamut monitor, that assumption is false, and displaying them this way can result in wildly wrong colors. Other browsers, like Firefox, don't make the same assumption, and the displayed colors of untagged images look similar to sRGB tagged images even on wide gamut monitors.

When I save a file, I always have the colour profile checkbox (in this case sRGB) ticked. That should embed the profile, shouldn't it?

I suspect what may be happening with some browers/monitors is that the browser is just taking the raw RGB values and stretching them to the limits of the monitor's gamut - i.e. 255, 0, 0 would be as red as the monitor can display, not necessarily the colour which corresponds to 255,0,0 in sRGB.

Quote
So when I look at the OP image in Firefox, it appears closer to "reality" than in does when I view it in Chrome, on a calibrated and profiled wide gamut monitor running Windows 10.

Now if I take the OP image into Photoshop and assign it an sRGB profile, and then save it with the profile embedded, it looks the same in either Chrome or Firefox on a wide gamut monitor. See the two attached images, one with sRGB profile embedded and the other not embedded, in your favorite browsers.
(Note: you have to click on them to see the difference; the non-color-managed thumbnails may look the same.)

Take home message:  if you want to ensure that your image looks as close as possible to the way it does on your monitor, when viewed on a wide variety of other people's devices and browsers, then convert to sRGB and embed the color profile.


For more info and a way to test your browsers, see this site: Web Browser Color Management Test

I've used every method I can find to try to get web images to look right in my browser. I'm running Firefox on Windows, due to the theoretical ability to run it as a fully colour-managed browser (and it used to work perfectly, at least in earlier versions). Even this page works as expected for a colour-managed browser: http://www.gballard.net/psd/go_live_page_profile/embeddedJPEGprofiles.html. So, according to all the tests, the browser is being correctly colour-managed.

Despite that, many images on the web end up looking tinted red and oversaturated.

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one iota

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Re: Aoraki/Mt Cook, New Zealand
« Reply #14 on: April 27, 2016, 12:32:24 am »

You were fortunate to be at that place at that time to capture that image. I drove that road 4 years ago and was made to draw breath at the beauty of that country. I have a panorama of the neighboring Lake Tekapo.

Regardless of the technical side of things (I've viewed it on both a wide gamut and narrower gamut monitor) I think you have given us a valid and dramatic impression of that landscape.
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Mahn England

shadowblade

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Re: Aoraki/Mt Cook, New Zealand
« Reply #15 on: April 27, 2016, 12:57:27 am »

You were fortunate to be at that place at that time to capture that image. I drove that road 4 years ago and was made to draw breath at the beauty of that country. I have a panorama of the neighboring Lake Tekapo.

Regardless of the technical side of things (I've viewed it on both a wide gamut and narrower gamut monitor) I think you have given us a valid and dramatic impression of that landscape.

How does it look on each monitor?

I have no confidence in predicting how things will look on monitors other than my own these days - all I can say is that it looks fine in PS on my monitor and it prints well...
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one iota

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Re: Aoraki/Mt Cook, New Zealand
« Reply #16 on: April 27, 2016, 02:01:16 am »

Both the monitors are calibrated: the primary monitor covers the Adobe RGB gamut, the second sRGB.

Viewing the downloaded jpeg with Capture One splitting two identical variants across both screens I can barely make out a difference in the cyan with the Adobe RGB being marginally more intense. The water color (cyan) is pretty much what I would expect for glacial run-off as my own shots tell me.The other hues are very much the same across both screens. We're only talking about a 'poofteenths' difference though.

Viewing via browsers might be a different kettle of fish.

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Mahn England

Arlen

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Re: Aoraki/Mt Cook, New Zealand
« Reply #17 on: April 27, 2016, 02:35:01 am »

When I save a file, I always have the colour profile checkbox (in this case sRGB) ticked. That should embed the profile, shouldn't it?

I've used every method I can find to try to get web images to look right in my browser. I'm running Firefox on Windows, due to the theoretical ability to run it as a fully colour-managed browser (and it used to work perfectly, at least in earlier versions). Even this page works as expected for a colour-managed browser: http://www.gballard.net/psd/go_live_page_profile/embeddedJPEGprofiles.html. So, according to all the tests, the browser is being correctly colour-managed.

I understand. As I noted, Firefox color manages an sRGB image correctly, even on a wide gamut monitor, and even if the profile is not embedded. So it would look OK on your end. But other people using a different browser may see it rendered differently if the profile is not embedded. (For example, in Chrome--but not in Firefox--it looks way too saturated on my wide gamut monitor.) In your original image above, somehow the profile was omitted or got stripped away. You can tell that by downloading it from your post, and opening it in Photoshop. When I did that, Photoshop said the image lacked a profile, and asked if I wanted to assign one. When the sRGB profile is then (re?)-embedded, it renders correctly in all browsers.

In all (I think) modern browsers, lack of an sRGB profile is an issue only on wide gamut monitors.

Hope this helps you get to the bottom of it.
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shadowblade

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Re: Aoraki/Mt Cook, New Zealand
« Reply #18 on: April 27, 2016, 02:37:58 am »

I understand. As I noted, Firefox color manages an sRGB image correctly, even on a wide gamut monitor, and even if the profile is not embedded. So it would look OK on your end. But other people using a different browser may see it rendered differently if the profile is not embedded. (For example, in Chrome--but not in Firefox--it looks way too saturated on my wide gamut monitor.) In your original image above, somehow the profile was omitted or got stripped away. You can tell that by downloading it from your post, and opening it in Photoshop. When I did that, Photoshop said the image lacked a profile, and asked if I wanted to assign one. When the sRGB profile is (re?)-embedded, then it renders correctly in all browsers.

In all (I think) modern browsers, lack of an sRGB profile is an issue only on wide gamut monitors.

Hope this helps you get to the bottom of it.

Thing is, many modern monitors - even those which aren't 'wide-gamut' - exceed sRGB by a considerable margin, which makes files corrected for sRGB look oversaturated on them.

Not sure why the profile wasn't embedded - I would have thought Photoshop did that automatically.
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one iota

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Re: Aoraki/Mt Cook, New Zealand
« Reply #19 on: April 27, 2016, 02:49:31 am »

I understand. As I noted, Firefox color manages an sRGB image correctly, even on a wide gamut monitor, and even if the profile is not embedded. So it would look OK on your end. But other people using a different browser may see it rendered differently if the profile is not embedded. (For example, in Chrome--but not in Firefox--it looks way too saturated on my wide gamut monitor.) In your original image above, somehow the profile was omitted or got stripped away. You can tell that by downloading it from your post, and opening it in Photoshop. When I did that, Photoshop said the image lacked a profile, and asked if I wanted to assign one. When the sRGB profile is then (re?)-embedded, it renders correctly in all browsers.

In all (I think) modern browsers, lack of an sRGB profile is an issue only on wide gamut monitors.

Hope this helps you get to the bottom of it.

Curiously both Firefox and Chrome render identically on both my monitors....Microsoft Edge (rarley use by me) is nauseatingly vibrant on my Wide Gamut display less so on the sRGB one. My software tells me that the embedded color profile is sRGB.
« Last Edit: April 27, 2016, 03:03:38 am by one iota »
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Mahn England
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