I don’t care about license. It’s just a bird pic. So I’m applying my “anybody can do anything” license to this image.
I rowed 3 miles down to the shallow end of a lake this morning and found many shore birds. Avocets, Marbled Godwits, Black-necked STilts etc.
My aging Nikon D7000 (I have a newer Sony but no 600mm for it yet) was set to White Balance Flash and I didn’t notice. I shoot in RAW but apparently Darktable notices the camera settings (is this right?) and then opens any given image accordingly, as per the camera settintgs. So now I have close to 300 exposures that do not look good. It’s not easy to get this close to wild birds so I want to save these exposures.
These are RAWs so I should be able to edit them back from the dead, but my trial and error approach is not working well. If I could make one successful edit perhaps I could make it a style and use the Darktable CLI to pre-process all 300 images before custom editing the best half dozen or so.
Does anybody have any tips or guidelines on the tip of their keyboard? For massaging Flash white balance back to bright sunny daylight?
Hmm. The white portions of the real birds are bright white without the sickly ochre-colored cast. The real green water weeds were a dark rich green. The black patches on the wings–of the real birds–are black, not that brownish gray in both my RAW and your quick stab at an edit. They are beautiful birds. Shore Birds are programmed by evolution to be alert and at all times afraid of anything that approaches by land (coyotes) or by the air (eagles and/or falcons). But if you approach slowly by boat (from the water) they let you get close. Sometimes even closer than this.
So, if I have this right (raw is raw is raw by Darktable adjusts my RAW images at start up, as per the camera settings in place when the image was made, then I could, perhaps, use some combination of bash and an exif editor in a loop, in order to change 300 image headers so they announce daylight for white balance rather than Flash.
The raw data has no white balance. Your raw metadata has flash white balance. Darktable, using the modern workflow ignores what the camera has set and tries to figure it out on its own. That has generally worked well for me.
DSC_8957.NEF.xmp (10.9 KB)
Could have used some local edits to do a better job but here is a quick one from me…also maybe too contrasted for your taste or reality??
And of course, if all the images were taken under close to the same lighting, you can edit one image for a proper white balance (especially as you have a good idea about the illuminant). Then copy the relevant part of the history stack from that image to all the others…
One of the advantages of RAW files is that no White Balance is enforced on the file. There is a drop down menu where you can select presets like direct sunlight, flash, incandescent as you wish. There are also other ways to manually set the white balance as outlined in the user guide. Here is a screen shot of the option for the Nikon D7100. I presume similar presets exist for the D7000
I don’t think that is true. There are two auto (‘AI’) options, but by default it reads the camera’s settings, but then switches to either to one of the standard illuminants (e.g., Daylight), or to custom.
you can try setting white balance to camera reference, enable color calibration, set the illuminant to Daylight, and drag the temperature slider:
You can then switch the illuminant to custom, and fine-tune:
Alternatively, turn off color calibration, and in white balance, set the daylight preset of the D7000:
That would give you a starting point. You can then tweak finetune, temperature and tint, or adjust the coefficients directly.
With only white balance, without tweaking, except for some local contrast + sharpening:
With color calibration (and white balance: camera reference), using the eye dropper in color calibration and filmic v6 in preserve chrominance: luminance Y:
My try in Filmulator. On loading the temperature showed as 6612.2. I changed it to 3995.2. No other changes other than scaling in GIMP. However, my monitor is not colour calibrated.
Great photograph, thanks for sharing.
Trying to get a white balance proved to be a little bit more complicated than expected (unless of course I go for daylight, 4200K but that wasn’t satisfactory). I could get the dark feathers neutral, which pushed to white to blue, or get the whites neutral, pushing the blacks to brown.
So looking at the pigments found in bird feathers, it appears that the dark colours are generally melanins (as in hair, red-brown-black) and porphyrins (several colours possible, but all with bright red fluorescence). So a brownish tinge in black feathers isn’t impossible under strong light.
For that reason, I pushed the white balance towards the lower end, at D (daylight) 3814K. I don’t really like using the pipette, when we know the light source, as is the case here.
For the rest, no real problems. Saturation to taste, as I have no idea how this bird looks in real life (being on the wrong side of the Atlantic)
Edit: Added some saturation after looking up these birds. But I doubt that the dark feathers of an avocet are really black. I would think it’s a very dark brown. DSC_8957.NEF.xmp (7.9 KB)
I think the nikon camera setting was a good starting point and a good suggestion for a guided starting point. If you compare it to as shot it removes a lot of the cast strait away and then if you color picker on the white you can further tweak with the mired slider…given all that grass (bounce light) and the tinge that birds usually have on white plumage absolutely pure white is not likely an accurate reflection of what it should be but this can be tuned to the eye of the beholder…
It’s darn hot outside so I’m editing photos…
Here’s my effort at 4600K. The pic says taken at 08:42.
I think my whites are whiter than some of the above (at least on my screen). @pittendrigh , I was wondering what the round patch is on one of the bird’s underside, say X=3/5, Y=1/4, starting from bottom left. DSC_8957-Avocets-rawconvert-edit-V1-SN-sRGB.xmp (49.3 KB)
My quick edit from this morning…before I head out the door.
These birds were slightly backlighted.
In a week from now–when the reservoir water levels drop because of active irritation–they will be in another spot I know, where the sun will be behind the camera. That spot, during the first few hours of daylight, is where I’ll be. I’ll post next week’s best at some point. Thank you all.
