Hi,

I do a lot of product photography, and whenever it comes to photographing products with bright colors, reds and yellows in particular, I cringe at the thought of my cameras ability to handle these colors. I shoot with a 5D and although its an excellent camera otherwise, it has trouble with reds and yellows.

I often spend extra time processing RAW files with these colors, and pay particular attention to the saturation levels. Please check out the links below for some examples of current images I am working on -


#1
http://img228.imageshack.us/img228/6705/saturation1lz5.jpg

#2
http://img228.imageshack.us/img228/9403/saturation2mp4.jpg


I have tried to de-sat the reds/yellows using a Hue/Saturation layer with a luminosity mask, as the darker parts of the image seem to suffer the most, and although I am making improvements, I still feel the images are loosing their "pop" from trying to control the saturation.

Any help or techniques on this matter would be appreciated, cheers Shaun.



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Hi MacBurg,

I don't know if this is in the right direction... I also used a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer decreasing Lightness and Saturation ...

I obtained a sharper 'shadow mask' by using Threshold.

Thanks for the input Flora, you seem to have levelled out the saturation globally, however I think the shadows have now darkened too much and the image has lost its contrast. Depressed Kevin is the most saturated figure of the bunch, he's the thin one and I'll keep experimenting with layers, any other suggestions would be great.

here's a h/s move with a curve on top of that to get back some of the saturation...i can read and see more detail, but the file is too small to truly see the results...

here's a 2nd version with just a channel mixer adj. layer with a mask for the reds only...

Thanks Pixelzombie, I prefer your second version using the channel mixer, I'll run through all the files when I do the resize and sharpen and see if I can achieve similar results.

I was sure there was an easier way in Photoshop, and I payed careful attention when shooting the images on camera to get the exposure bang on, I'll post a link when they go "Live" on the web.

Hello My Name is Justin Murphy. I am a calgary wedding photographer located in calgary, alberta. My website is www.murphyimages.ca. I am new to this blogging thing....
But I love your suggestions.

Thought I'd have a go. Duplicated and desaturated the duplicate, reduced the opacity to 10% and set the blending mode to saturation. Second one is as above, but opacity reduced to 20% and blending mode set to darken

If I understand your concerns, try: Color range select of the reds, make selection: (command-J to dupe selection only), Change the mode to screen on new layer:
adjust opacity to fine tune. Simply and quick. ;>}

Your thinking is sort of right, but you need to take it a step further and determine what your real problem is. By definition, the more saturated a color, the farther away it is from the neutral axis, which means that it is lacking in that contaminating color that would turn it grey. But here's the catch: those contaminating colors are where your detail comes from. So the problem isn't specifically that your colors are saturated, it's that there is no detail. Using Sat/Desat moves won't address that problem.

I played around with some channels and luminosity blends and came up with these versions. I wasn't thinking about color much at all, but rather, how to engineer the detail that was clearly present in the Green and Blue channels into the final result.

http://edgework.tripod.com/samples/sat1.jpg
http://edgework.tripod.com/samples/sat2.jpg

As I say, I wasn't thinking about color, though the results are decent. Lighter perhaps, on first glance, than the originals, but that's because there are actual highlights and shadows showing up, rather than a more or less flat sheet of tone.

Hi MacBug,

Try a selective colour adjustment layer. You would have to fiddle around till you got the colours that you preferred though.

Thanks everyone for the advice and techniques offered, as Edgework has explained, bringing back detail that is present in the original file is the solution I am looking for, its just a shame the 5D can't handle reds/yellows in camera. I will spend a bit of time experimenting with channels/blend modes today and hopefully work out a technique that can be used in my workflow.


Thanks again, Shaun.

Shaun, are you using Adobe Camera Raw? With ACR 4.2, you can use the HSL/grayscale controls to work on the luminance for the reds and yellows. The Vibrance control is supposed to be an "intelligent" control of saturation and help prevent clipping.

Don't know if these controls by themselves will get you where you're heading, but there is a lot of power there and you can still use Photoshop afterwards if needed.

As a photographer first i would suggest you have a look at the 5D custom function settings.

Perhaps you have the in camera saturation too hi/low for what your doing, as well you may have the camera " mode" set incorrectly.

As an example the manual says "portrait mode, slightly crisp and sharp", In fact it creates a slightly soft image. Yes we have pointed it out to Canon Australia, who will no doubt do nothing. Landscape enhances greens and blues from the manual i think from memory.

You may also want to make sure your exposures are dead on and /or bracket the exposures which should help you a lot.

The settings you mention for the 5D are only used when shooting Jpegs in camera. I only shoot RAW files and I shoot tethered to a Macbook Pro using Capture One Pro, this lets me view the RAW file as shot, compared with the 5D's Lcd which I find shows the image considerably brighter then the actual RAW file. For certain products ie. jewelry, I shoot more than one exposure to be combined later in Photoshop, but in general when you shoot tethered you can adjust the lighting/camera settings and reshoot to get one perfect exposure.

Thanks for the hints with Camera Raw 4.2 CJ Swartz, I did pay very close attention and made some adjustments to the RAW files in Camera Raw, using the HSL/grayscale sliders, but because the files go into Photoshop afterwards, I prefer to do major adjustments there where I can localize them. I have a similar but not so big of a problem with T-Shirts also, I will begin to edit these this evening so hopefully will be able to put all this help to use, thanks again.