BCSS - Forum

I have had a new Chamaelobivia open this morning, 'Lincoln Friend' (Thanks Andrew!).

The colours on it are fantastic - (I am colour blind so these might be off!) A really bright pink tip to the petals fading to an orangey centre.

However the photo looks like this! This was taken in daylight.

Any tips (short of serious photo processing) that will help to get more accurate colour rendition?

I have the same plant, Ed, and I agree, the colours are beautiful. However, red tones seem to be difficult to photograph, whichever device you use (I find the same problem). So I’m afraid I’m not much help!

At least I know it's not just me struggling Diane so that is a help! Thank you.

I'm going to take it home with me tonight (it's in my office) and try it outside with a black background over the weekend if there's a break in the weather!

Digital cameras are over-sensitive to red so they tend to blow out intensely red subjects. You can compensate with a blue filter, but most people won't have the equipment for that. You can avoid blowing out the red highlights by underexposing the image and then correcting (boost the other colours) on the computer. Works best if you can capture RAW images, but you can do it with any camera, even a phone. Experiment by taking multiple images over a range of exposures and see which retains all the red detail best.

More light. Under expose. Turn the saturation down (don't forget to turn it up afterwards). Trick is to stop the camera blowing out on the reds.

That will give a slightly orange flower. Boost the colours in editing software afterwards.

Take lots of pictures with different exposures etc (if you can), and experiment to get something that works better.

Chris L wrote: ↑Fri May 14, 2021 4:35 pm More light. Under expose. Turn the saturation down (don't forget to turn it up afterwards). Trick is to stop the camera blowing out on the reds.

That will give a slightly orange flower. Boost the colours in editing software afterwards.

Take lots of pictures with different exposures etc (if you can), and experiment to get something that works better.

Chris

Hi Ed,

Have you seen the Ishihara test? I encountered it in a job description of all things and gave it a try, not that I’m colour blind myself!

AndrewB wrote: ↑Sat May 15, 2021 8:03 pm Hi Ed,

Have you seen the Ishihara test? I encountered it in a job description of all things and gave it a try, not that I’m colour blind myself!

Sat for ages looking at them when I was screened as a kid. Everyone else just did about 10 and then left but the nurses took me all the way through their book of them to check what sort of colour blindness I had!

Was showing them to some colleagues last week too as one of the pupils was asking about it.

I have a friend who learned the page sequence so he could pass a medical. He's colour blind.

Late reply but I was waiting for a red flower. As has already been said large areas of red seem to cause a problem in the software that converts the individual red, greed and blue sensitive sites on the sensor into full colour (ie a red, green and blue value) for each site. Depending on your camera/phone you might be able to influence this process by using pre-set scenes (that what one of my camera uses). It is possible to apply a setting in some photo editing software but not quite the same as the software is trying to mimic what happened in the camera.

This picture shows preview screen which is supposed to let you see how the final image will look - colours on screen look different to the plant to me. My camera did a reasonable job with the details on the petals except near the centre where it is the same colour all round