Here is a cheeky little European Robin, perched obligingly beside the path. Taken in March up in N Lincolnshire on a sunny day, but shadowed by the trees lining our path.
I like the detail on the feathers, although I appreciate it might be too crispy for some. I think the colours are about right although some might want punchier red (after all, the bird is commonly known as robin redbreast. . .)
However, after a bit of playing around with the photo trying to learn a bit more about various options including ColorBalanceRGB, I clicked on the gamut checker, and saw a lot of speckles of “out of gamut”. The vector scope confirms the issue in the reds.
Clicking thru the history panel, the gamut issues are affecte by quite a few different modules.
So my question is - should I be worrying about gamut, when the photo looks good. Presumably because the DT gamut correction is handling the issues.
Or should I pay more attention, particularly when its red that is out of gamut? Does the gamut compression slider in Color Calibration do anything? ER6_2855.CR3 (24.3 MB) ER6_2855.CR3.xmp (19.0 KB)
I would not care too much about gamut, when the image looks good on screen or print.
Here is my version. The reds are a little on the yellow side, but that is how these birds often appear to me (at least here in Germany). For comparison, that’s how I developed a shot I made some time ago.
Nice take, but I think a tinge of blue has crept into the streak of feathers to the left of the breast. UPDATE I think there really is a steely blue-gray in those feathers - apologies!
Also looks like a good advert for sigmoid as the overexposure on the lower breast and the dead tree trunk has been well handled.
Lovely bird…you mention sigmoid and the tweak to a couple of highlighted areas… you could also try this in your own edit… enable filmic HLR… use settings like this …it tweak the tree front leg lower breast feathers and the tail just bringing back the color slightly… so just a small spin on your own edit which is nice
As for gamut DT is a bit complex on this one. THere are more than one interpretation of gamut and it can depend on what profiles you use. THere is the full gamut and alternatives that you can get from the overexposure warning. THis uses the histogram profile. If you are going out of gamut here this is likely bad as it reflects out of gamut in your working space assuming you set them equal which I think is still the current default. So depending on the settings and the threshold you will get one representation…
So for that gamut assessment I get this for full… I use rec2020 as a working space…
Some people will choose to try to remove all of this before exporting. Is this needed. I don’t think so but others may be more rigid.
With color management your output profile will map the image using the rendering intent if it supports that and if not I think the default profiles for DT only support perceptual as they don’t have the LUT’s necessary for the other rendering… Again I could be wrong but I think this is for sure the case for the web safe srgb profile…
So if you have some out of gamut colors and an output profile that support rendering intents then you can get this sort of mapping in your output from the output profile…
THink of the wide gamut as your working space and then these as options for exporting in your output space…
So IMO for the most part if it looks good and you don’t have massive gamut issues at any point in the working space before outputting then I think you are okay…
On top of all this there used to be an issue with DT as certain display profiles processed the data in the pipeline impacting the gamut readings. In that case or as a check for one of those profiles you would set your display adapter temporarily to the same profile as your working profile. This will make the image look bad on screen but now when you use the gamut checker you get accurate gamut assessment and if it does change then your monitor profile is one of those profiles and if not then you are good… This has been explained much better else where and may even to a degree have been fixed. But it would require a change in the pipeline that I don’t think has been done… but someone will likely know better…
So in the end you can have different assessments of gamut in DT and you may have a personal preference or tolerance for what you find acceptable…
The main color objective in raw processing is to crunch down the rich camera color response into limited gamuts of rendition media like displays and print. This is pretty much a “no-op” for a lot of colors, and with simple matrix math the out-of-bounds colors are arbitrarily moved into t the destination gamut and they look okay.
Some colors don’t survive that transition well, extreme blues and reds for instance, and need special attention. The ochre hues in the textured feathers of your image seem to do okay, cool beans.
How well gamut compressions render is a bit of a subjective call, IMHO; if it’s not good, you’ll know it…
I find the biggest challenge with bird photos is to make the bird stand out from the background without making it look as if I cut out a picture from a magazine and glued it onto of a background.
That s why I like Diffuse or Sharpen as it does lend more of a 3D effect if you play it right.
I feel like Boris has done a few examples of enhancing this sort of situation by manipulating the background. Maybe even in his recent masking series but you could make a request for a short video on how he would edit this or others like it. He may even recall specific examples he has done that would offer context… @s7habo
Here is my attempt. I decided to lighten the background to make the bird standout more. Also sharpening and lens deblur from the diffuse or sharpen module was masked to the bird and branch.
I think you really hit the spot with this one, great balance between bird and bokeh, nice detail on the Robin - this one can go on the Winter Calendar!
. But according to the color checker it is more greenish than blue.
