timeimmortal

Here’s an image in which I’ve heavily adjusted the saturations of the colours — everything but red has been more or less reduced to nothingness (a bit of orange, purple, and magenta were kept). I took the shot, initially, because I liked the lines of the scene and the way the sunlight was refracting through the glasses on the table. It proved to be a fun one to play with in post-processing, as well.

I grabbed this shot at a Chinese restaurant favoured by Grace’s grandparents, and I like to think of it as a testament to the power that seemingly innocuous things — curtains, in this particular example — have over image colour quality. Functionally, this image looks almost the same with or without all the colours save red removed from it; in fact, I think it looks truer to life when only the red is left in the image.

This is because of two competing factors, both of which can negatively affect image quality. The first, of course, is the source of light in the room (the Sun) and the fact that the light has to filter through red-tinted curtains . The second is white balance, and the EOS 350D’s attempt to compensate for the colour cast it detects in the scene. Taken together, these competing factors produced an initial image that was, shall we say, less than good.

Fortunately, Lightroom gives me very tight control over colour in an image.

In addition to the saturation adjustments, I applied a lot of noise reduction (the camera was at a high ISO setting again) and some sharpening to round things out a bit.

~ by Kenneth on April 22, 2008.