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What color was it really? -- Kodachrome
rutt
Registered Users Posts: 6,511 Major grins
My personal goal for this challenge was to have the song in mind when I pushed the shutter instead of finding the song afterward. I've had all kinds of more challenging songs in mind, partucularly "Prelude to a Kiss" and "Urge for Going". I've also been listening to my music collection like mad trying to fill my head with good options. So when I finally got to Paul Simon and "Kodachrome", well what could be more perfect for me?
Then two days ago I was up before dawn and looked out the window and saw this sky. I mean I'm sort of a connoisseur of this particular scene at this particular time of day, but this was off the charts. So before coffee or anything I hurried up to the roof with camera and shot it very wide. Turns out I wasn't the only one who noticed this. It was sort of the talk of the town among people who get up very early or stay up very late.
I shot this image in RAW+JPG so I got both from the camera. I have the camera set so that it doesn't sharpen or add saturation to the jpg. So in some twisted sense, the jpg from the camera is very "fair". No human desisions have been made. Also the camera is set for sRGB, which means it is possible to post the jpgs directly out of the camera and have them look the same in the browser as PS. Here is the original image:
I was pretty happy with this, at least the sky. But the foreground is so dark. I tried to open it up both by changging the exposure of the RAW conversion and by using shadow/highlights. But the truth is that most of what is in the foreground is sort of ugly. My first approach was to just steepen the L curve to make most of it black. That is the first image I posted to the C&C gallery. It didn't take me long to figure out that a crop would also help to focus attention on the sky and elimenate the offending foreground elements. So I did that. In the process, I also steepened the A+B curves symetrically by 10 in each direction and sharpened, something I do pretty often. Probably it's about like letting the camera do a little sharpening and saturation, but more controlled. And I posted the yesterday:
But when I looked at the image on smugmug with my browser, it just didn't look at all like the image in PS. The red in the sky was more pink than red in the browser. Less fire. It was a mystery. Instead of applying science, I just applied frustrated engineering and turned up the A+B steepness juice until I got an image in the browser that seemed to match the original 10 A+B steepened image in PS. And that's what I entered yesterday:
This was the end point of a process that I cannot reproduce. Every image I saved during this process looked different in PS than in the browsers (firefox, IE, mac, linux, windows.) It was a mystery and not the way I like to do things, but eventually I declared victory and submitted the above.
This morning I decided to take a more careful approach and see what happened. I started out with the original jpg (no raw conversion this time.) This does look the same in PS and the browsers. I cropped and rotated a little and got this:
It seemed unlikely that a crop would be the problem, but I checked anyway and PS and the browsers still matched. Whew! It would have made me crazy if that had been the problem.
Next I applied my L curve to make the foreground black and bring up the drama and detail in the sky. Here is the
curve:
and the result:
Oh, yes, I also had to paint out a few foreground elements that weren't doing anything for me. But that was just a dab here and there. And yes, this image still matched in PS and the browsers.
Now I wanted to see if I could get some fire in the sky, so I steepened the A+B curves symetrically by 10 and did a little USM:
Once again, the result looked the same in PS and the browsers. Looked pretty good to me. Not as much fire as yesterday's, but more natural and not broken in that the browsers display it the same way as PS.
I thought I'd see if I could get a little closer to yesterday's image and still retain the browser/ps harmony. So I steepend by 15 instead of 10:
The browsers and PS still agree and now I just have to decide. The extreme firey look from yesterday was nice, but there is something I don't understand wrong with it and I cannot be sure how it will look on other people's monitors. There are three big differences between yesterday and today's process:
Then two days ago I was up before dawn and looked out the window and saw this sky. I mean I'm sort of a connoisseur of this particular scene at this particular time of day, but this was off the charts. So before coffee or anything I hurried up to the roof with camera and shot it very wide. Turns out I wasn't the only one who noticed this. It was sort of the talk of the town among people who get up very early or stay up very late.
I shot this image in RAW+JPG so I got both from the camera. I have the camera set so that it doesn't sharpen or add saturation to the jpg. So in some twisted sense, the jpg from the camera is very "fair". No human desisions have been made. Also the camera is set for sRGB, which means it is possible to post the jpgs directly out of the camera and have them look the same in the browser as PS. Here is the original image:
I was pretty happy with this, at least the sky. But the foreground is so dark. I tried to open it up both by changging the exposure of the RAW conversion and by using shadow/highlights. But the truth is that most of what is in the foreground is sort of ugly. My first approach was to just steepen the L curve to make most of it black. That is the first image I posted to the C&C gallery. It didn't take me long to figure out that a crop would also help to focus attention on the sky and elimenate the offending foreground elements. So I did that. In the process, I also steepened the A+B curves symetrically by 10 in each direction and sharpened, something I do pretty often. Probably it's about like letting the camera do a little sharpening and saturation, but more controlled. And I posted the yesterday:
But when I looked at the image on smugmug with my browser, it just didn't look at all like the image in PS. The red in the sky was more pink than red in the browser. Less fire. It was a mystery. Instead of applying science, I just applied frustrated engineering and turned up the A+B steepness juice until I got an image in the browser that seemed to match the original 10 A+B steepened image in PS. And that's what I entered yesterday:
This was the end point of a process that I cannot reproduce. Every image I saved during this process looked different in PS than in the browsers (firefox, IE, mac, linux, windows.) It was a mystery and not the way I like to do things, but eventually I declared victory and submitted the above.
This morning I decided to take a more careful approach and see what happened. I started out with the original jpg (no raw conversion this time.) This does look the same in PS and the browsers. I cropped and rotated a little and got this:
It seemed unlikely that a crop would be the problem, but I checked anyway and PS and the browsers still matched. Whew! It would have made me crazy if that had been the problem.
Next I applied my L curve to make the foreground black and bring up the drama and detail in the sky. Here is the
curve:
and the result:
Oh, yes, I also had to paint out a few foreground elements that weren't doing anything for me. But that was just a dab here and there. And yes, this image still matched in PS and the browsers.
Now I wanted to see if I could get some fire in the sky, so I steepened the A+B curves symetrically by 10 and did a little USM:
Once again, the result looked the same in PS and the browsers. Looked pretty good to me. Not as much fire as yesterday's, but more natural and not broken in that the browsers display it the same way as PS.
I thought I'd see if I could get a little closer to yesterday's image and still retain the browser/ps harmony. So I steepend by 15 instead of 10:
The browsers and PS still agree and now I just have to decide. The extreme firey look from yesterday was nice, but there is something I don't understand wrong with it and I cannot be sure how it will look on other people's monitors. There are three big differences between yesterday and today's process:
- Yesterday I used PS/CS on a mac. This morning I used PS 7 on a pc (well on linux with wine).
- Yesterday I did a raw conversion, today I started with the jpg.
- I used different L curves yesterday. I didn't save them.
If not now, when?
0
Comments
Out of curiousity, do you use the preview in PS before you save to jpeg? Does it still look different with the browser vs. PS?
As for your photos, I like the second day's versions better. The reds were way too strong on my monitor. The only other thing is that I would be inclined to clone out the jet trail.
Nice Shot
Brad
www.digismile.ca
Anyway, perhaps the jet trail would work better with Angel of the Morning, but I still love it. Those jets are part of Nantucket life. They fly over the island on their way between NYC and Europe. We have a radar beacon here that they use.