Good Day Sunshine

[AndrewMcD]

The garden provides so much motivation this time of year. I couldn't resist this shot as I noticed the early morning sun illuminating the petals as I was watering the garden.

[lovelife65]

I love this, for the very reasons you took the photograph. The illumination works well with the shadows from the plant, and the bright colors allow you to get away with it and still present beautiful contrast and colors.

[xpatUSA]

The garden provides so much motivation this time of year. I couldn't resist this shot as I noticed the early morning sun illuminating the petals as I was watering the garden.

Nice composition, Andrew.

Yellow flowers are not the easiest to get the colors right and your petal colors are a bit over-saturated. That is to say that there is no [blue] in them and my HSB color picker says mostly 100% saturation everywhere in the petals. Not intended as a criticism; flowers are well-know for that kind of thing, especially red ones which can actually come out monochromatic with no blues or greens at all!

[Manfred M]

Andrew - I'm a big fan of back-lit (or side-lit) flower shots as that brings out some amazing details in the texture of the shot.

The downside of back-lighting is that the opaque parts of the flower are in shadow and unless you lift the shadow detail a bit, those parts of the image are just a touch too dark for my taste. Pushing those values into the midtones (done with the Shadows slider in Lightroom /ACR) usually results in a stronger image.

[Shadowman]

Nice one.

[AndrewMcD]

Manfred,
I was on the fence about raising the shadows because I liked the contrast of the almost black background which, when the shadows are raised, reveals the fence in the background. None the less, I think your edit has improved the image, thank you.
Andrew

[AndrewMcD]

Hi Ted,
Thanks for the comments and perhaps you can help me better understand the saturation issue. I did not raise the saturation in post. The only post processing was a mild contrast adjustment and some sharpening. Might the contrast adjustment be responsible for what you see as over saturation? I did make a point of adjusting exposure so as not to clip the reds and yellows. Would the 100% saturation you refer to be a function of the sensor in my camera recording the available light and emphasizing the yellow to the detriment of any other color? Any thoughts or comments on this issue are appreciated.
Andrew

[xpatUSA]

Hi Ted,
Thanks for the comments and perhaps you can help me better understand the saturation issue. I did not raise the saturation in post. The only post processing was a mild contrast adjustment and some sharpening. Might the contrast adjustment be responsible for what you see as over saturation? I did make a point of adjusting exposure so as not to clip the reds and yellows. Would the 100% saturation you refer to be a function of the sensor in my camera recording the available light and emphasizing the yellow to the detriment of any other color? Any thoughts or comments on this issue are appreciated.
Andrew

Andrew, I'll certainly try to explain.

First I admit to a bad mistake - the petals have no blue, not "no green", a classic Ted oops. The comment about saturation stands though.

I'll start by saying that if we look up the reflectance of yellow flowers in nature, they do reflect a little in the lower wavelengths. So, after conversion from camera space to, say, sRGB there should be a little in the RGB blue channel. Anywhere there is none, something must have happened between the actual flower and your monitor screen.

I tried some wild contrast adjustment and the saturation didn't change much. I lowered the saturation by a few points and some blue quickly appeared in the RGB color, between 14 and 25 out of 255. Adjusting brightness downward can increase saturation slightly.

Over-saturation (100%) often happens when for example the capture is in Adobe RGB, edited in ProPhoto and then saved for the web in sRGB. Yellow flowers can have colors that are outside of the human color visual range; the sensor can normally see a bit outside of that range so I'm going to discount that as a cause.

The next step in processing is conversion from camera space to an wide-gamut working file, often linear ProPhoto where those pesky yellows are still intact (not out-of-ProPhoto-gamut).

Then let's say you select Adobe or ProPhoto working space in your editor. In some editors, the color picker numbers change to match that selection and yellows still look OK with a bit of blue in them. However the instant you convert to sRGB for the web, those yellows can get clipped to the sRGB gamut boundary which often forces blues to zero.

I've got a paper by Jack Holm of HP about sensors picking up radiation outside the CIE visual gamut (the horseshoe diagram), may be of interest to some of us:

http://kronometric.org/phot/gamut/Ca...ysisGamuts.pdf

There's a Nikon D70 and a Canon 20D on the next to last page ...