Luminous Landscape Forum
Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Adobe Lightroom Q&A => Topic started by: KenKovak on April 10, 2012, 07:49:36 pm
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This is a screenshot of my desktop in LightRoom 4. I have two issues I do not understand.
First is the color banding in the sun. It is a little hard to see in this small size but it is definitely there when I look at the image in LR. Why is that?
Second, is the reason for the two images. The left is the image converted with the LR3 2010 process and the left is LR4 2012 process. You can see that the yellow colors have been lost from the sun. Any one understand why and what I can do about it? I have tried playing with hue and saturation sliders but not with satisfactory results.
Thanks in advance,
Ken
PS - fully calibrated monitor and all that.
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In 2012, try pulling the highlights way down. You may have to compensate by adjusting exposure, shadows, and whites. I do a lot of sun-in shots and this usually does the trick. I get the banding when I use HDR and push the highlight recovery too far. If I watch it, I don't have nearly as much problem. I assume your shot was not HDR, in which case I don't know what causes the banding except that it might be the nature of the beast at those high exposure levels. You know you have pushed the recovery too far if you start seeing narrow dark bands between the very light areas.
I find I have to do a lot of manual touch up of the sun. Techniques include adding color, adding saturation, smoothing out banding and bad flare with the stamp tool used in light and dark modes at low opacities. This is relatively too complicated to explain fully here
My problem is that I can rarely get an exposure with a near full sun which is not blown out to white. I get a small white disk which is the sun, surrounded by the colors of the sunset. This white sun does not look right so I select that area with selective color and the use a color fill adjustment layer to fill that area with a yellow (about 60ish degrees on the color picker). The color should be full saturation and brightness and will look terrible until you take down the opacity until you get a nice very light yellow which blends with the rest of the sky. Then I use the techniques above to refine. I grabbed some quick examples to show what I mean, before and after.
Larry
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Are you certain the banding is an artifact? Distant layers of cloud could produce a similar effect naturally when the sun is near the horizon.
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Ken, are your images being displayed at 1:1?
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Second, is the reason for the two images. The left is the image converted with the LR3 2010 process and the left is LR4 2012 process. You can see that the yellow colors have been lost from the sun. Any one understand why and what I can do about it? I have tried playing with hue and saturation sliders but not with satisfactory results.
This is interesting. It is almost certainly to do with the way that PV 2012 compresses highlights. I would imagine that in this case the yellow hue, comprised of R plus G, is close to 100/100. LR4 has compressed it more heavily than LR3, causing R to predominate and in the process losing the yellow hue. To test this theory you could mask the sun with a brush and increase Highlights in PV 2012. If I'm correct, the yellow hue should come back. If I'm wrong (Jeff and Eric) you can say "nice try but no cigar, John" ;)
John