What am I doing wrong?

[JBW]

[pnodrog]

What do you think is wrong?

[Mike Buckley]

Your question reminds me of a situation decades ago when I was having a particularly bad night (as opposed to my usually bad night) at the bowling alley. I asked the guy with by far the best average on our team what I was doing wrong. Without missing a heart beat he explained that I wasn't knocking down enough pins.

[JBW]

Your question reminds me of a situation decades ago when I was having a particularly bad night (as opposed to my usually bad night) at the bowling alley. I asked the guy with by far the best average on our team what I was doing wrong. Without missing a heart beat he explained that I wasn't knocking down enough pins.

exactly.

[JBW]

What do you think is wrong?

I'm not knocking down enough pins.

[Dave Humphries]

Hi Brian,

To possibly pre-empt Manfred, with this one, I'd suggest it is 2/3 stop under exposed (as presented here).

If I were shooting this and if I had noticed in time, I would have plucked that dead leaf from the background.

Note the big 'if' - things like that are always easier to see in front of a computer

Dave

[Wavelength]

In my opinion nothing wrong about it, except that some work need be done; we seldom get a nice background for flowers, especially when it is not in your own garden or planted directly in soil.....I made some adjustments, as below Hope you dont mind ...



Regards

[Manfred M]

+1 to Dave's comments.

Your exposures are consistently biased towards the blacks. As I've written before, I strongly suspect that your screen is too bright and you are adjusting by eye. Adjust to the histogram and you will take a major step forward in your PP work. A restricted range in the shot is the biggest issue I see in a lot of your images.

I don't have a problem if you want dark and moody shots, but you should achieve this by adjusting the gamma (mid-point), not the blacks or white values.

[xpatUSA]

Also, something odd with the blues in the posted image, perhaps to do with the original light or perhaps to do with the post-processing:



With the scaling selection shown, the histogram is scaled to the highest count. Clearly, the blue channel is excessively dominant in the shadows. I can't think of any good reason why that should be.

After messing around with RawTherapee in the shadow area, I get this, for what it's worth:



That scaling button in RawTherapee is most useful. In the other position it expands the Y scale (log?) which, to an extent, masks the extent of this anomaly.

[JBW]

In my opinion nothing wrong about it, except that some work need be done; we seldom get a nice background for flowers, especially when it is not in your own garden or planted directly in soil.....I made some adjustments, as below Hope you dont mind ...



Regards

a picture is worth a thousand words. I never mind when someone shows me instead of tells me.

[JBW]

Hi Brian,

To possibly pre-empt Manfred, with this one, I'd suggest it is 2/3 stop under exposed (as presented here).

If I were shooting this and if I had noticed in time, I would have plucked that dead leaf from the background.

Note the big 'if' - things like that are always easier to see in front of a computer

Dave

When i started out with Fujifilm the best way I found to increase detail was by shooting and processing on the dark side. A technique I need to change. This time i actually saw he leaf pre shot but I didn't think it would be quite as bright as it turned out.

[JBW]

Also, something odd with the blues in the posted image, perhaps to do with the original light or perhaps to do with the post-processing:



With the scaling selection shown, the histogram is scaled to the highest count. Clearly, the blue channel is excessively dominant in the shadows. I can't think of any good reason why that should be.

After messing around with RawTherapee in the shadow area, I get this, for what it's worth:



That scaling button in RawTherapee is most useful. In the other position it expands the Y scale (log?) which, to an extent, masks the extent of this anomaly.

The abundance of blue is definitely the result of my pp. One more technique adjustment required.

[JBW]

+1 to Dave's comments.

Your exposures are consistently biased towards the blacks. As I've written before, I strongly suspect that your screen is too bright and you are adjusting by eye. Adjust to the histogram and you will take a major step forward in your PP work. A restricted range in the shot is the biggest issue I see in a lot of your images.

I don't have a problem if you want dark and moody shots, but you should achieve this by adjusting the gamma (mid-point), not the blacks or white values.

I am having a problem getting my shots SOOTC to not be biased towards the dark side. But I am working on it.

[DanK]

the best way I found to increase detail was by shooting and processing on the dark side.

Shooting on the dark side captures less information and will therefore give you a worse signal/noise ratio. That's just the physics of it. Doesn't matter what the camera is.

I am having a problem getting my shots SOOTC to not be biased towards the dark side. But I am working on it.

Look at the histogram after your first shot in a set. If it is underexposed, change how you are metering or add exposure compensation. That is one of the great things about digital: you can find out instantaneously whether your exposure is off and then, at no cost, redo the shot with a better exposure.

Today I was doing some baby candids with bounce flash and a bounce card, with an E-TTL flash. I looked at the histogram after a few shots and saw that in one of the settings, the photos were a good stop underexposed. I added +1 EC, and most of the rest were just fine.

[Mike Buckley]

Look at the histogram after your first shot in a set. If it is underexposed, change how you are metering or add exposure compensation.

Bingo! I simply don't understand why anyone would not do that.

[Manfred M]

I am having a problem getting my shots SOOTC to not be biased towards the dark side. But I am working on it.

Brian - you are hoping that your light meter can deliver more than it is capable of in this type of a shot. The light meter in a camera reads the light that is REFLECTED by your subject, rather that measuring the light that is actually falling on the subject, like an incident light meter would. This means that the camera manufacturers have made an assumption about the amount of light that reflects in the scene; i.e. a "middle gray" value. As long as an image is reasonably "average", this usually works out fairly well.

If you take a scene that is not average like a snowscape, the camera's middle gray and end up underexposing the shot. In a night scene, the opposite happens and the camera tends to overexpose, and the image will end up being on the light side. In the case of your light coloured flower, your camera underexposes and your image end up being too dark.

As Dan says, use the histogram to judge and either use exposure compensation to push the histogram to the right. You can also shoot manually, and change the exposure that way. The histogram your camera produces is one of the best tools you have to judge the exposure.

[TonyW]

I am having trouble coming to grips with what people are saying here. Firstly, I don't see that the image as first presented is simply under-exposed. I took the image and increased the exposure in photoshop and the brightest parts of the petals quickly became blown out. The problem to me is the flatness of the tones. When I changed the "gamma", things improved and the image changed along the lines of Nandakumar's version, which was a great improvement.

Also, with respect to what Dan said, shooting a little on the dark side is often a good thing, particularly if there is a high dynamic range in the scene, provided circumstance allow you to do so with the ISO low. Th exposure can then be corrected in pp. It is true that that will give a worse signal to noise ratio but if the ISO is low that should not be too much of a problem, less of a problem than dealing with important areas that are blown out.

With reference to Manfred's comments, if you take a picture of a snowscape with automatic exposure, it will come out grey. But when you look at the histogram, it will be dead centre, which might look correct. While the histogram gives much information, it still needs to be interpreted in the context of the picture.

Perhaps I now need to duck for cover.

[JBW]

Shooting on the dark side captures less information and will therefore give you a worse signal/noise ratio. That's just the physics of it. Doesn't matter what the camera is.



Look at the histogram after your first shot in a set. If it is underexposed, change how you are metering or add exposure compensation. That is one of the great things about digital: you can find out instantaneously whether your exposure is off and then, at no cost, redo the shot with a better exposure.

Today I was doing some baby candids with bounce flash and a bounce card, with an E-TTL flash. I looked at the histogram after a few shots and saw that in one of the settings, the photos were a good stop underexposed. I added +1 EC, and most of the rest were just fine.

part of the problem was that I had the camera on auto ISO and auto wb. When I forced the camera to deal with 100 or 200 Iso and i choose the wb the in camera histogram moves around quite nicely. Not that I know why it works hat way but it does.

[DanK]

Also, with respect to what Dan said, shooting a little on the dark side is often a good thing, particularly if there is a high dynamic range in the scene, provided circumstance allow you to do so with the ISO low. Th exposure can then be corrected in pp. It is true that that will give a worse signal to noise ratio but if the ISO is low that should not be too much of a problem, less of a problem than dealing with important areas that are blown out.

We agree with respect to this particular image. I was responding to Brian's general comment, and to his images generally, not to this specific one. However, given this particular image, I should have been more precise. I am certainly not advocating increasing exposure to the point where you blow out highlights. Rather, I was suggesting that when the histogram shows exposure to be lower than it needs to be--when it spans less than the full range and is toward the bottom rather than the top--the best thing is to increase exposure. AFAIK, as long as you don't blow out highlights, there is never an advantage to keeping exposure lower. You can always lower it in post.

In response to your post, I took a histogram of this shot, and in this case, you're right: the problem was different. Because of the pinks, the histogram does go all the way to the right. My first step would be what you suggest: move the mass of the histogram up in post, while leaving the top end.

[Mike Buckley]

While the histogram gives much information, it still needs to be interpreted in the context of the picture.

That's the entire point. There is no reason not to view the histogram, but when you do it must be viewed in the context of the scene being photographed.