Details in Red

I was strugglng to get the right look for the red petals

1. standard in camera settings, used adobe rgb in camera, histogram looked fine, no blown highlights, but can't really see any details in the reds, changed color shema to sRGB, resized and saved as jpg
http://i256.photobucket.com/albums/h...DSC0098800.jpg

2. working with the nef file in capture nx2, changed the camera settings to neutral, this lowers the saturation, added contrast with color LCH sCurve, changed color shema to sRGB, resized and saved as jpg
http://i256.photobucket.com/albums/h...C0098800v2.jpg

Quite an improvement in the details :cool: and looks much more like the original

... dang reds !!

I like the color in the first one and the detail in the second :)

Detail in red was a problem for film, too. Something about the red wavelength is hard to capture. I've found the best way to deal with the problem is selectively adjusting red saturation with a hue/saturation adjustment layer in Photoshop. It has a dropdown that lets you select from a bunch of colors, including red. Bringing down the saturation allows you to see more detail and contrast.

This may provide a good rule of thumb when deciding whether to shoot RAW or just JPG ... if it has reds, better shoot RAW.

LOL, yeah , I though of that as well John, I liked the intense reds, but they loose the details

GB, yes I was debating whether to post a new thread or added it into one of the existing ones asking if RAW is good

Quote:

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Originally Posted by armando_m

LOL, yeah , I though of that as well John, I liked the intense reds, but they loose the details

GB, yes I was debating whether to post a new thread or added it into one of the existing ones asking if RAW is good

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No no - you did good. This is totally deserving of its own thread.

If you really wanted to get into it, you could use multiple masked, transparent layers in Photoshop to get the best of both workds - the saturation and the detail. All the tools are there. It's just a matter of figuring out how to get what you want out of them :)

another try

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6205/...f8382247_b.jpg

the small flower is near the wall so I bounced the flash on it
sigma 150 lens
added some tonal contrast with color efex pro on the flower
converted to jpg with capture nx2