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[OM] Re: [photo] Lost at Firenze

Subject: [OM] Re: [photo] Lost at Firenze
From: Moose <olymoose@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2007 15:45:17 -0800
First I gotta ask. Is this image as far out of focus as it appears on my 
screen? Looks like handheld with a significant bump/jerk between parts 
of the exposure, or like two layers slightly offset in PS. I can still 
comment on colors, but am curious about sharpness. It sort of hurts my 
eyes staring at it closely.

Fernando Gonzalez Gentile wrote:
> Yes it does well with the statue, Chuck. But OTOH, it kills the red - orange 
> - yellow hue which is characteristic of almost every Italian architecture I 
> was able to see.
>   
I used to find that Auto-Color almost always gets the color wrong, 
sometimes by very little, sometimes by a lot. All it can really do is 
balance all the colors to average to a neutral gray. So if the subject 
has a predominant color, it gets it wrong.

Here's an extreme example I did up using a shot of a single red clover 
against a very bright green, freshly painted barn door. As you can see, 
the PS Auto-Color function turned the door pure gray. It's an extreme 
example but I like to htink a clear one in showing why Auto-Color can be 
so wrong on many images.

A much better option, in general, is to use Levels or Curves, select the 
middle dropper and click it on parts of the image that look like they 
should be neutral gray in tone. Bright or dark doesn't matter with this 
dropper, only a neutral balance of RGB.

This can be slightly tricky and is going to be subjective if you didn't 
put a pure neutral reference into the image. One problem, more with 
film, is that an overall neutral colored area may be composed of a lot 
of little colored pixels, from film grain or digital chroma noise.

An other problem, as here, is that different parts of the image may be 
in different light. Here, the left side of the image and the back of the 
fellow in the brone horse are in shadow, while most of the right side is 
in sunlight. so if you want true color in both areas, you need to color 
correct at least two different layers differently, then paint at least 
one as a mask. Fortunately, our eyes are used to this moderate color 
difference, expect it, even, in this kind of image. In some others it 
does look better corrected at least partially.

For this image, I found that clicking the neutral dropper on the center 
band of the no entry sign on the lower right or on the gray stone in the 
upper center got rid of the magenta cast nicely while maintaining more 
overall warmth than Auto-Color. You can easily play with the dropper 
until the overall color pleases.
> I did add a little blue to the sky, which is way burned out in the 16 bit 
> .tiff but faintly light blue in the Ektachrome .... fear this 4000ED is not 
> working as it should.
>   
Probably not the scanner. More likely the software and operator. The 
loss of subtle sky color sounds like the White Point is set wrong, 
resulting in unwanted clipping. On the other hand, the shadows could use 
some judicious combination of multiple scanner passes, increased black 
point and/or noise reduction.

Moose

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