It may sound odd, but I have problems with flower petals. Imagine a yellow crocus in the morning sun, having a few dew drops on top. It seems as if it does not matter how careful I am with exposure – the red channel still is grossly overexposed, especially at the top of the flower.
What would be your recommended way of processing in such a case?
I will plug Filmulator here, it’s particularly good at handling bright, saturated channels without going ugly, or darkening everything else. Let me find some examples…
It works with other colors too, like pink, red, and orange.
Don’t shoot flowers in direct sunlight.
As for processing, supply a sample raw file, then we can talk.
So the linear histogram isn’t bad at all; you haven’t really clipped anything, and this is without highlight recovery. You had at least half a stop of headroom or more if you include highlight reconstruction, depending on how well your camera manages to hold highlights.
(The white vertical line indicates where the colors start to roll off to white, not where it clips)
Turn up the drama a little, lower the white clipping point:
And we have our result:
I had a lot of fun with this photo, getting the same result using various tools, but each with its own twist.
It’s really not a difficult image to process, as the light was as great as one can expect being natural, so the dynamic range is quite low and easy to manage. What you need to do here is to adjust the exposure without clipping colors. The three easiest ways of doing so in RawTherapee are using the Exposure tool’s curves with their various modes, using the LH (Luminance as a function of hue) tool in Lab* Adjustments, or using the LC (Luminance as a function of chromaticity) tool also in Lab* Adjustments. These three are not mutually exclusive so you could even use all three at once though there’s no need to.
Here are three versions.
This one uses the LC curve to reduce the luminance of highly saturated colors.
DSF0737 morgan LC.jpg.out.pp3 (9.6 KB)
This one uses the LH curve to do the same. The LH curve does what the LC does but on a per-color basis, so it’s generally more powerful. I lowered the luminance of the reds which in itself has an amazing effect, and then increased the luminance of the yellows to add depth. The flower pops more. Open the images in tabs and switch back and forth, you will see the flower pop out in this one.
DSF0737 morgan LH.jpg.out.pp3 (9.9 KB)
Both of the above use a CIECAM02 Brightness curve, because it increases brightness in a easy way without clipping anything. This one also uses LH, but CIECAM02 is disabled, and to achieve the same brightening effect I used both Exposure curves; darkening with one using the Film-like method, brightening with the other using the Luminance method.
DSF0737 morgan LH ExposureCurves.jpg.out.pp3 (10.0 KB)
In GIMP I duplicated the blue channel and set a new from visible layer to soft light, making sure to turn off the duplicate to avoid doubling the effect. I then set the red channel as a layer mask and increased its contrast with levels.
@Morgan_Hardwood I’m gonna have to play around with those techniques. The results are rather impressive.
Dear all,
Thank you! I appreciate all the advice you have
given and I am happy to say that you have
helped me to understand a little more about
what is possible with RT, Filmulator, and Gimp.
Claes
Addendum: if you have not done so already: fetch my raw file, then download Morgan’s different pp3 files (above) and apply them to my photo. See how little is really needed to create quite different impressions!
@Morgan_Hardwood Man, each of those three example processes looked great!! I think the third approach produced colors that were just a bit more balanced in the end. It looks amazing! Thanks for the tips!
