The sky is blue - or should be...

[Stephen Ray]

I'm glad you brought that up because it is an invisible hue when when mixed with a bluish looking daylight image especially with a magenta hued blue sky. How much yellow should be seen in green foliage lit by a noon day sun on a clear day? How warm does the sun make natural objects look no matter whether they are cool or warm toned? To get a convincing daylight appearance it helps to take note how much magenta is in sky blue.

Not a high-end camera using "P" mode (auto), kit lens, hand-held, white balance "As Shot", one-click "auto" button for color, color checker in the scene for reference.

[digitaldog]

Not a high-end camera using "P" mode (auto), kit lens, hand-held, white balance "As Shot", one-click "auto" button for color, color checker in the scene for reference.

Indeed but before even going to such proof of concept, which was indeed more proof, the silly 'idea' that Magenta is an invisible hue is simply, well super silly. Simply examine the definition of hue:
Hue is one of the main properties (called color appearance parameters) of a color
If it's a color, it can't be invisible. Nor, as Tim suggests, can editing something invisible be subjective (how do you subjectively edit something invisible?). Just one more example of his color science fiction. Instead of color science.

[nirpat89]

@nirpat89, reply #18
Your sky looks VERY good to me! I will later have to try if I can duplicate it using your method. I'm not familiar with Levels. - The fore- and middle ground I find too dark. So if I succeed duplicating your sky, I'll apply it using a mask.

Yeah I didn't spent too much time trying to perfect the fore- and middle grounds.  You can do a Curves or Brightness/Contrast layer with a reversed gradient mask to fine tune those areas.   I am not familiar with RawTherapy but I am sure you should be able to manipulate the histogram towards a similar final outcome as the Levels adjustment in Photoshop. 

:Niranjan.

[Stephen Ray]

I'm not familiar with Levels.

Really Hening?

[Stephen Ray]

Common example of memory color being “a perfectly blue sky the day of photography.”

[Stephen Ray]

Magenta – When you need invisible fire hydrants.

[digitaldog]

Magenta – When you need invisible fire hydrants.

It matches the invisible magenta patch on the Macbeth quite well! 

[Stephen Ray]

It matches the invisible magenta patch on the Macbeth quite well! 

I think it would be interesting to learn from the decision maker how they arrived at this color for their hydrants. Maybe simply because they know the color easily stands out against the opposite color of the green lawn. Hydrants in my neighborhood are now white and appear to blend with the surroundings. I have no idea what those decision makers are thinking but I often notice cars parked in front of the white hydrants.

[Stephen Ray]

Example of letting the camera use automatic mode for balancing white and exposure of a backlit scene resulting in perceptually natural shadows as I recall. No modifications were made via processing in Lightroom.

[Czornyj]

"The problem with restricting maximum brightness to 100 nits (as in TV and Blu-ray) is that the brighter the color, the closer it becomes to white, so bright colors become less saturated. For example, the brightest saturated blue on an ordinary display is a mere 7 nits, so a blue sky will never be as bright and saturated as it should be."
https://www.dolby.com/us/en/technologies/dolby-vision/dolby-vision-white-paper.pdf

see p.4 - Hunt effect:
http://rit-mcsl.org/fairchild/PDFs/AppearanceLec.pdf

"Many people erroneously think of a photograph as an “exact” reproduction of a scene. The reality is that light levels in a natural scene can’t be reproduced using any current technology and certainly not in a print."(...)
"As photographers, our job is to interpret the scene as a print. We must make the decisions about what to keep and what to throw away. The photographic print is limited. To compensate for those limitations, we must enhance and discount portions of our image to create a photographic print that evokes our original perception. The raw workflow allows us to express our artistic vision.
The scene is our message, the photograph our media, and rendering is the art."
http://lumita.com/site_media/work/whitepapers/files/pscs3_rendering_image.pdf

[TonyW]

....
@TonyW, reply#44

> Is there any reason why your first image has an embedded monitor profile?
I would think it is because it's a screen shot?

The version of RT I used was 5.3-602.
...

Coming from Windows background I was not aware that Mac OS embedded the monitor profile, so I guess my question seemed odd?

FWIW, Windows 10 Screenshot
Save an image as PNG.  PS gives a warning; "The RGB document "Screenshot(1).png" has a file format that does not support embedded color profiles" plus the option to assign a profile or Leave as is (don't color manage)
Using the Windows inbuilt Snipping tool will save an image automatically without an embedded profile

Realising that I was using an older version of RT I changed today to the newest v5.4 (Win 10).  Dragging your raw into that initially produced a much brighter image (clipped) as it added a tone curve (film).  Setting Tone curve to standard and using the method in my first post seems to produce the same result.  Hope that helps

[Tim Lookingbill]

Example of letting the camera use automatic mode for balancing white and exposure of a backlit scene resulting in perceptually natural shadows as I recall. No modifications were made via processing in Lightroom.

Stephen, thanks for posting all those examples. It confirms that not all camera's UV/IR filters are the same. I can never get the warm (slightly reddish looking) shadows in your shots from my 2006 Pentax DSLR shooting Raw which has been stated in Pentax forums has a Sony CCD sensor with very thin filters which produces overly reddish orange mids to highlights and overly bluish shadows shooting daylight scenes with incamera AWB. I can fix it in ACR 6.7 but then I have to use Split Tone quite often or else my images show an overall slightly greenish bias as shown in my first example. This is when I discovered the magenta slider can do a better job without affecting the rest of the memory colors.

I have to say your Xrite CC chart doesn't look too accurate to my daylight shot chart (accurate according to its Lab numbers) but then I'm assuming you weren't going for accuracy. Your camera reproduces daylight scenes quite different from my camera edited or unedited.

Hening's overly cyan/green daylight shot is not anywhere close to looking like it's lit by the sun but if he neutralizes the WB it'll make it look too warm since he's indicated the blue sky already looks a muddy yellow. That's messed up.

I'm wondering if the Eizo's WB calibration is set within the display's internal hardware LUTs which would not show up in a screengrab which is created straight off the 8 bit video card frame which has no WB curves applied.

[Tim Lookingbill]

"The problem with restricting maximum brightness to 100 nits (as in TV and Blu-ray) is that the brighter the color, the closer it becomes to white, so bright colors become less saturated. For example, the brightest saturated blue on an ordinary display is a mere 7 nits, so a blue sky will never be as bright and saturated as it should be."
https://www.dolby.com/us/en/technologies/dolby-vision/dolby-vision-white-paper.pdf

see p.4 - Hunt effect:
http://rit-mcsl.org/fairchild/PDFs/AppearanceLec.pdf

"Many people erroneously think of a photograph as an “exact” reproduction of a scene. The reality is that light levels in a natural scene can’t be reproduced using any current technology and certainly not in a print."(...)
"As photographers, our job is to interpret the scene as a print. We must make the decisions about what to keep and what to throw away. The photographic print is limited. To compensate for those limitations, we must enhance and discount portions of our image to create a photographic print that evokes our original perception. The raw workflow allows us to express our artistic vision.
The scene is our message, the photograph our media, and rendering is the art."
http://lumita.com/site_media/work/whitepapers/files/pscs3_rendering_image.pdf

I agree that photography can be an interpretive artform but I've gotten pretty darn close to reproducing daylight scenes in my locale as it appears to me despite the limitations of my old DSLR. In addition I've found photos posted of daylight scenes over in Photo.net's No Words forum from non-professional photographers come really close, better than my camera.

I have a background in photo realistic painting and have extended experience mixing colors made from various pigments and dyes. I know what light does to natural memory colors. I do believe the limitation for not being able to get very close to representing any natural color captured with a digital camera shooting Raw is mainly the photographer's fault.

[digitaldog]

I have to say your Xrite CC chart doesn't look too accurate to my daylight shot chart (accurate according to its Lab numbers)

Your Lab numbers are bogus for one.... Or you don't understand them....
Next, it's rather clear viewing an sRGB image of Stephen's (lawn and lake shot, post #61) that the Macbeth and the scene is brighter than a synthetic Macbeth, the largest differences are in Lstar. If we examine aStar and bStar of the synthetic Macbeth purple patch (you know Tim, that invisible color), the deltaE differences between his shot and the Macbeth is pretty darn small: 3.13 in fact!
The aStar value of that patch should be 50, the bStar should be -13. The sRGB image produces an aStar of 54, a bStar of -20. Normalize the scene brightness and you get a very small dE. Now darker the scene CORRECTLY to get an Lstar to 51 of that 'invisible' magenta patch, the aStar remains the same, and bStar moves to 56, the deltaE is a whopping 3.21dE. DAMN close!
Need we go over the other 23 'visible' hues in his shot or is the 'invisible purple' which is a mere 3.13 dE difference enough colorimetric facts from some to ignore?

but then I'm assuming you weren't going for accuracy

Yes, you're again assuming and yes, you're wrong about his capture. 

[Tim Lookingbill]

Marcin,

Why can't a DSLR shooting Raw interpret a scene as I see it? How do you separate interpretation from what the photographer saw when the technology won't give the photographer what he wants which is what he saw?

For example the image example below shows what I term fluorescing of green foliage by the the sun just above horizon. The one on the left is the default Raw and the one the right is my edited version according to what I saw. Is that artistic interpretation or an attempt at reproduction of the scene?

[digitaldog]

Coming from Windows background I was not aware that Mac OS embedded the monitor profile, so I guess my question seemed odd?

Depends on what is making the screen capture. Indeed, if you use the built in screen capture functionality from Apple, the display profile is embedded which makes sense. I use Snapz Pro which produces an untagged doc which I don't like but the product has other functionality I need. So I assign the display profile and convert to sRGB if I wish to post on the web. FWIW, I use a product on the Mac called Hazel which can keep watch of folders I specify and tag or convert the images automatically.

[digitaldog]

Why can't a DSLR shooting Raw interpret a scene as I see it?

Seriously? This is what raw data appears as:




And you're still massively confused between color appearance and color perception or the fact that these cameras suffer metameric errors as they don't follow the Luther Ives condition.
Read, learn, THEN post:
http://dougkerr.net/Pumpkin/articles/Metameric_Error.pdf

[Tim Lookingbill]

Still ignoring nimrod.

[digitaldog]

Still ignoring nimrod.

But others are not ignoring your misinformation and confusion!
Tim, you've been very productive in the last 48 hours, let's see what your readers have learned other than, maybe don't be a reader of your posts. You appear mostly a glutton for punishment. Quite an accomplishment for just a day posting here!

Magenta is the invisible hue...

Invisible, then we are told editing Magenta is subjective.

D50 display which isn't a neutral white.

Wrong and corrected by a fellow who is the author of ArgyllCMS & ArgyllPRO ColorMeter. What color management products did Tim author?

And to any nimrod that posts the plankian locus showing where D50 falls within the area of neutrality, I've got about 5 different versions of this locus and it places D50 way over in the warm region, so just stop posting those useless idiotic, worthless maps.

He doesn't understand what the CIE chromaticity diagram is and what the Planckian locus (notice his misspelling) is or what it means or what GWGill tried to explain to him.

Here's the skin tone lab reading and ACR white balance slider settings.

He doesn't know how to set ACR to provide Lab values, nor understand the Lab values from the Digital Color Meter do not tell us about the underlying image data in ACR.

Still ignoring nimrod.

He doesn't understand that a nimrod is a king and mighty hunter!

It's clear Andrew hasn't edited very many daylight images seeing he isn't a photographer any longer and is just a technology writer.

He doesn't understand what a professional photographer is nor what a technology writer is. Tim, let's trade photo client lists here; I'll start, here are some of my clients who paid me to make photographs:

Corporate Annual Report and Advertising photography specializing in people. Clients included Apple, GTE, Forbes, Microsoft, Smart and Final, Disney, Mrs Gooch’s (they became Whole Foods), Epson, the LAOOC.

Do tell us about your photography clients, do attempt to be factual as it should be easier than writing about color, a subject you seem the need to study a lot more and write a lot less about.

[Stephen Ray]

I have to say your Xrite CC chart doesn't look too accurate to my daylight shot chart (accurate according to its Lab numbers) but then I'm assuming you weren't going for accuracy. Your camera reproduces daylight scenes quite different from my camera edited or unedited.

Yes, I wasn't going for accuracy. I wanted to learn what would happen if one were to rely on "auto" mode while making simple captures of scenes similar to your lake and foliage but with a reference we are familiar with. Without the Macbeth chart, I would not know to what degree captures were effected but now I do know the trend.

The trend was; the camera changed white balance settings and exposure significantly with all the captures being good, especially for an amateur I think. Lightroom "auto" buttons showed good judgement for WB but trended to make the overall scene too light and sometimes too saturated in instances. I'm still curious to learn what the software finds in the scene to make that adjustment, however those adjustments might produce a very good prints from consumer grade printers without ICC color management.