What causes that ugly over saturated yellow "blooming" when shooting certain sunset pictures at certain exposures? It seems to get worse when shooting into the sunset itself, even after the sun as set.
Hi,
I'm currently writing an article about this effect and have realised that it is a 'gamut' issue which is difficult to find because it is a combination of the icc profile of the camera capture and the icc profile of the raw conversion and the icc profile of the monitor.
When the monitor tries to display a colour that it can't manage, it 'moves' it to one that it can. This causes a discontinuation in smooth gradients.
You will see that the transition moves around as you alter the 'exposure' slider.
The best way to get rid of this is
1) Use a good raw converter - adobe isn't great, capture one is a *lot* better
2) Use a wide working space, prophoto at least but I would highly recommend Joseph Holmes Ektaspace
3) Once you have the picture converted and loaded into photoshop, reduce the exposure by a small amount. You should see the transition fade.
You can check the picture by setting your soft proofing to use your monitor icc profile and then use the 'gamut clipping' feature in the view menu.
By reducing the exposure, you are bringing the colour values closer to the centre of the gamut envelope.
You may want to increase saturation or exposure later, keep an eye on what will happen to the view by using a crappy monitor. Obviously if you also want to print, most printers have a lot bigger colour spaces than monitors so the yellow/pink band may not appear when you print out - you can check this by soft proofing using a printer profile.
Tim Parkin
http://www.timparkin.co.uk