Luminous Landscape Forum
Equipment & Techniques => Landscape & Nature Photography => Topic started by: shadowblade on April 26, 2016, 01:31:35 pm
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Aoraki/Mt Cook at sunset, with Lake Pukaki in the foreground.
Sony A7r with Canon 70-200L II
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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.
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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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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, 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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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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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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A less-dramatic look at Mt. Cook:
(http://www.kasson.com/ll/MtCook.jpg)
Jim
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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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Love the composition and scene but I agree it looks a bit overdone.
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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 (http://cameratico.com/tools/web-browser-color-management-test/)
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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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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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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.
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 (http://cameratico.com/tools/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 (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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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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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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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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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 (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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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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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.
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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.
Really wish software (and hardware) manufacturers would pay a little more attention to colour space, accuracy and compatibility issues. For the moment, all we have browser-wise is Firefox, and even that doesn't seem to work particularly well (on my wide-gamut monitor, the same thing in Firefox looks red and super-saturated compared with Photoshop) and requires hacking into hidden settings to make it work at all.
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Good light and composition.
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I think it's really getting there SB. Whatever you're doing, it's much improved. I think the blues are still pushed a little too much. If possible perhaps dialing it back until the blue cast in the pavement (foreground) turns black might help overall. But it's a very contrasty light so you may not be able to and keep the water as you have it. The mountains have a bit too much blue cast now.
But overall it's a powerful and dramatic presence. This is not an easy piece to edit, for sure.
Mark
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I think it's really getting there SB. Whatever you're doing, it's much improved.
But overall it's a powerful and dramatic presence. This is not an easy piece to edit, for sure.
Mark
Agreed.
SB, your latest modification of the image within the original post, dated April 26, 10:58:44 pm, now has an embedded sRGB profile. So whatever you did, you have fixed that issue. And it now looks the same in both Firefox and Chrome.
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.
Mahn, the images in both Microsoft Edge and MS Internet Explorer continue to look "nauseatingly vibrant" on my wide gamut monitor, too. So those two browsers are apparently not color managed at all. As noted above, your software tells you that the image in the original post has an embedded sRGB profile because after SB's latest modification, it now does.
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I think it's really getting there SB. Whatever you're doing, it's much improved. I think the blues are still pushed a little too much. If possible perhaps dialing it back until the blue cast in the pavement (foreground) turns black might help overall. But it's a very contrasty light so you may not be able to and keep the water as you have it. The mountains have a bit too much blue cast now.
But overall it's a powerful and dramatic presence. This is not an easy piece to edit, for sure.
Mark
I've already had to dial back the turquoise, since, straight out of camera, it almost blew out Adobe RGB, let alone sRGB.
Just corrected the slight green colour cast and saved it again, using a different conversion setting. How does it look now? Aside from the slight colour correction and cloning out dust, etc., I haven't actually done anything to the ProPhoto RGB file since I first posted this image - the only thing I've changed is conversion settings to change it to sRGB. So the problem seems to be entirely in the conversion settings, not the original edit...
Agreed.
SB, your latest modification of the image within the original post, dated April 26, 10:58:44 pm, now has an embedded sRGB profile. So whatever you did, you have fixed that issue. And it now looks the same in both Firefox and Chrome.
Just saved it again to fix a colour cast, clone out some dust and apply a slightly different conversion method. Does it still work properly?
Mahn, the images in both Microsoft Edge and MS Internet Explorer continue to look "nauseatingly vibrant" on my wide gamut monitor, too. So those two browsers are apparently not color managed at all. As noted above, your software tells you that the image in the original post has an embedded sRGB profile because after SB's latest modification, it now does.
If someone's running a completely non-colour-managed browser on a wide-gamut monitor, I doubt there's much I can do to make the image look good there.
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If someone's running a completely non-colour-managed browser on a wide-gamut monitor, I doubt there's much I can do to make the image look good there.
That's right. You've done everything you can now to address that problem.
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I've already had to dial back the turquoise, since, straight out of camera, it almost blew out Adobe RGB, let alone sRGB.
Just corrected the slight green colour cast and saved it again, using a different conversion setting. How does it look now? Aside from the slight colour correction and cloning out dust, etc., I haven't actually done anything to the ProPhoto RGB file since I first posted this image - the only thing I've changed is conversion settings to change it to sRGB. So the problem seems to be entirely in the conversion settings, not the original edit...
Just saved it again to fix a colour cast, clone out some dust and apply a slightly different conversion method. Does it still work properly?
If someone's running a completely non-colour-managed browser on a wide-gamut monitor, I doubt there's much I can do to make the image look good there.
I think it's really a tough edit because of the original contrast, SB. It seems that no matter what, one adjustment significantly affects another, like the blues in the water and mountain and the blue in the asphalt on the road. I understand that you're attempting to get a global edit to deal with the entire image, but I don't know if it's possible, embedded profile, monitor and browser issues aside.
As we both know, an image like this is often tackled with HDR, but in this one, it would be just ugly eye candy using HDR rendering algorythms.
In tough images like this where the contrast is just "spikey" if the image is worth it to me and I really care about it, I select several parts or "components" of the image and make layers out of them and edit each individually, mostly for color, clarity, shadow/highlight and sharpness. Once refined, I begin by editing each area by doing a 3 layer approach in new images by selecting the area just edited and making a new layer via copy, then going back to the background, select the inverse making a new layer via layer copy, then I make final adjustments and flatten the 3 layer sandwich and move on to the next major component adjustment. I would probably have several independent layers: Sky, water, roadside right, road, roadside left, roadside left upper, and mountains. Each layer would be individually edited for the above mentioned and would be feathered in via layer coppies. An edit like that would probably take me 2-3 maybe four hours, but each element would be fully controlled and not influenced by any other. In most cases, I make layer masks and or paint the adjusted layers in.
You've just about got it, but given the complexity of the interactions of the shadows and highlights and nearly clipped areas of several colors I'm just not sure you can do more other than getting into the kind of edit I discuss above. Of course stylistic preferences play a big role as well. If you want blocked up shadow areas such as in the edge of the evergreens, and you want blue for the color of asphalt, and you don't mind if you've lost much of the detail in the grasses on the right side of the road, then overall if it's the effect you're going for, then you have it.
I do think it's a very cool capture and like I say, editing-wise, you've got a tiger by the tail.
Mark
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I think it's really a tough edit because of the original contrast, SB. It seems that no matter what, one adjustment significantly affects another, like the blues in the water and mountain and the blue in the asphalt on the road. I understand that you're attempting to get a global edit to deal with the entire image, but I don't know if it's possible, embedded profile, monitor and browser issues aside.
As we both know, an image like this is often tackled with HDR, but in this one, it would be just ugly eye candy using HDR rendering algorythms.
In tough images like this where the contrast is just "spikey" if the image is worth it to me and I really care about it, I select several parts or "components" of the image and make layers out of them and edit each individually, mostly for color, clarity, shadow/highlight and sharpness. Once refined, I begin by editing each area by doing a 3 layer approach in new images by selecting the area just edited and making a new layer via copy, then going back to the background, select the inverse making a new layer via layer copy, then I make final adjustments and flatten the 3 layer sandwich and move on to the next major component adjustment. I would probably have several independent layers: Sky, water, roadside right, road, roadside left, roadside left upper, and mountains. Each layer would be individually edited for the above mentioned and would be feathered in via layer coppies. An edit like that would probably take me 2-3 maybe four hours, but each element would be fully controlled and not influenced by any other. In most cases, I make layer masks and or paint the adjusted layers in.
You've just about got it, but given the complexity of the interactions of the shadows and highlights and nearly clipped areas of several colors I'm just not sure you can do more other than getting into the kind of edit I discuss above. Of course stylistic preferences play a big role as well. If you want blocked up shadow areas such as in the edge of the evergreens, and you want blue for the color of asphalt, and you don't mind if you've lost much of the detail in the grasses on the right side of the road, then overall if it's the effect you're going for, then you have it.
I do think it's a very cool capture and like I say, editing-wise, you've got a tiger by the tail.
Mark
Dynamic range isn't really the issue here, although I did take three exposures, two stops apart, to ensure there wouldn't be any nasty surprises. Colour is the far bigger challenge - intense orange-yellow direct sunlight, contrasted against blue, scattered light in the shadows.
I decided to leave the road blue, because, in that kind of lighting, shadow areas are blue - blue light is scattered more than any other colour in the visible spectrum, which is why the sky is blue and why shadows are also blue. And, the warmer the direct light source (and you don't get much warmer than direct sunlight just before sunset), the bluer they look. Neutralising the blues in the shadows is not only unrealistic, but, if performed as a global colour temperature adjustment instead of a local adjustment, would turn the whole image orange.
There's plenty of room to lift the shadows a bit, via a global curves adjustment, but the last thing you'd want is the faux low-contrast appearance usually seen in badly-tonemapped images.
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That's right. You've done everything you can now to address that problem.
...from a technical p.o.v. How about from a human p.o.v.? It is still over-saturated looking. Perhaps it was the day or the place or the lighting. Perhaps it's our collective notion that it has to look natural to be correct. But we must also consider another option... Why is it always the fault of the equipment or software?
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...from a technical p.o.v.
Yes, that's the only issue I was addressing here.
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There is much drama and beauty in the photo (snow-capped mountain, winding mountain road, etc) so even if somewhat over-saturated in the blue part of the spectrum, it makes the whole ensemble seem very surreal and so adds another, yet different layer of lusciousness to your shot. It is hard for me to find words to describe this shot (apart from the usual -- eg. beautiful, dramatic) because of the surreal nature of the overall piece caused by my monitor's interpretation of the range of saturated blues. And if it is still beautiful in an over-saturated way, then on your monitor (and in print) which have corrected for this, it must be stunning. Thanks for sharing!