Digital Photography Guide

Pop Quiz: What is the color temperature of the light hitting your monitor right now?

Followup Question: Do you know why it matters?

Many people do not give much thought to the light hitting their monitor while editing photos. Yet it is critically important if color accuracy is important in the least.  Let me show you the importance with a few shots. See if you can guess the color temperature of the light hitting the each screen. Know that my office is a small 5′ x 8′ room, off-white walls and a skylight overhead. (Exposure of each shot was balanced in post production with only the exposure setting itself increased to match other shots.)

Ready for the answers?

• Indirect Daylight off to the side, from above (4650K)
• Cloudy light from above (5450K)
• Direct Daylight (5001K)
• Direct Daylight with a white fabric placed over the skylight opening (4100K)
• Indirect Daylight with a white fabric placed over the skylight opening (4300K)
• Direct Incandescent/Tungsten light bulb at night (2750K)

Each photo is clickable for a larger 1200 pixel wide shot. I balanced the shots according to a white card test of the light (shot separately) except the last image which was left at the camera chosen 5250K, otherwise the 2700K renders far too blue.

Our brain takes the light coming in and, in essence, auto corrects it. If viewed in a complete black environment, a screen can be color calibrated and show colors as true. This is fine and should be done. How our brain perceives colors coming from the screen will also be influenced by the color temperature of the light available at the time. Most manufacturers suggest calibrating your screen with the anticipated ambient light sources available (and the best calibration tools are able to balance for this light).

For the first image, I was going to use the shot without my reflection as a more pure example. But I thought it important to leave in because most of us don’t realize what effect we have our images. If light is coming from behind you (in this case, there was direct sunlight on the wall to the side of the iMac, which was reflected off the rear wall as well) then your shadow can make a large difference. I could have done the same for the last shot, where the bulb is clearly visible in the corner.

Some suggestions to help make sure colors stay true:

• Calibrate your screen in, ideally, a black environment. If your calibration tool of choice does not measure ambient light, just ensure there is not an over abundance of one light source or another. If it does measure ambient light, use the source you anticipate being available while editing (or make multiple profiles for each light source).
• Edit your photos in the likely light source they will be viewed under when printed.
• Be aware of the color of your walls.
• Only have one light source hitting your screen at a time while editing.
• Use indirect light when possible and do not place your light source behind you.
• Realize light reflected off items viewable from the screen’s reflection will influence results.

The second item can be very important. If your screen is calibrated correctly and you edit photos with a tungsten light source, your brain is adjusting for that source. In that case you make white look as you percieve white to be in that instance. Now, when you print that image (let’s assume the printer is properly calibrated and you used an ICC profile to soft proof) and present it in indirect day light, the colors will not match what you saw on your screen. Likewise if you took it into direct sunlight. But it will come closer when viewed at night with a tungsten source.

It’s important to edit, on a calibrated screen, with a light source as anticipated when the print itself is viewed. Baring a known source, Indirect Daylight is the best bet.

If you need information on calibrating your monitor, DPS has a post for that here.

Post from: Digital Photography School's Photography Tips. Check out our resources on Portrait Photography Tips, Travel Photography Tips and Understanding Digital Cameras.

Be Aware Of The Light Source Hitting Your Screen

Develop Presets are powerful Lightroom tools. You can use them to quick start your editing in Lightroom and to apply creative fixes to your images. You can create your own presets and you can download them from the web. Here are my top five tips for harnessing the power of Develop Presets.

1. Create Disconnected Presets

Instead of creating a preset which, for example, applies a split toning effect as well as a vignette to an image, split this into two separate presets. Then you can use the split toning effect as well as the vignette if you want to do so but you also have the ability to apply one and not the other. If both effects are applied with one preset, you’ll have some work ahead of you to undo one of the effects. In addition when they are separate presets the vignette, for example, could be used on images where you would not consider also using the split toning effect.

2. Create Undo Presets

When you create a preset that adds, for example, grain or a vignette to your image, consider at the same time creating a preset that removes that effect. If you call the two presets the same name such as Grain_heavy and the delete preset Grain_heavy_del they will appear side by side in the list and it will be obvious that the second preset cancels out the effect of the first. Then, when you apply the preset and subsequently make other changes to the image you can easily remove the effect of the preset without having to wind back all the changes you’ve made.

3. Choose the Right Tools

I recently downloaded a great preset which applied a cool effect as well as a vignette. Unfortunately the designer applied the vignette using the Lens Vignetting tool in the Lens Correction panel. This isn’t a post crop vignette so, while the preset worked fine on some images it failed spectacularly on images which had been cropped. When you want to add a vignette, do this using the Effects panel’s Post Crop Vignetting options so your preset will work on any image cropped or not. Testing your presets with a range of images will tell you if they have problems that using a different solution may avoid.

4. Organizing Presets

If you’re creating a lot of presets or downloading a lot of presets from the web, it will help to organize them neatly. For this purpose, I like to create separate folders for preset sets that I download from the web. This allows me to open or close a folder of presets to display all its contents or shrink the list to show just the folder title. Be aware that the folder hierarchy for presets is very flat and you cannot create folders inside folders for example.

If you have a lot of your own presets consider grouping them in folders too – so you might have a folder of editing presets and then a second folder of more creative presets. You can drag and drop presets from one folder into another in the Develop module.

If you download or create presets and you know you will never use them, right click the preset and choose Delete to remove it from Lightroom and from your disk.

5. Apply them on Import

Here’s a good reason for ignoring Tip #1 (at least for now) and for creating a Develop Preset that applies all the changes you typically apply to your images. So, if you typically apply some extra Brightness, Clarity and Vibrance and some noise reduction to your images, make all these changes to an image and save them as a preset. Now, in the Import dialog’s Apply During Import panel you can choose this preset and have it applied automatically to all images as you import them.

Post from: Digital Photography School's Photography Tips. Check out our resources on Portrait Photography Tips, Travel Photography Tips and Understanding Digital Cameras.

5 Top Tips for Lightroom Develop Presets

Design & Features The Tokina 12-24mm f/4 ATX Pro DX is a ultra wide lens specifically designed specifically for Canon and Nikon APS-C format DSLR cameras. The lens has a constant maximum aperture of f/4 throughout the zoom lens with the optical construction made of 13 elements in 11 groups with diagonal angle of view [...]

I approached this book with a little scepticism: it looked like another coffee table book, large format, stacked with beautifully rendered photographs of exotic landscapes and little else.

But then I skimmed David Noton’s introduction and gathered that he feels digital cameras have opened a whole new world of photographic opportunities “that would not have been possible in the film era.” He then proceeds to offer information on his working methods and philosophy.

He finds colour in Morocco’s towns with a shot of a yellow-orange clad washer woman against a vibrant indigo. No filters. No post work. One frame. Just as it is.

In Bali he recounts that with a film camera he would bang off a run of frames in the quest of the winning shot, bracketting exposure and re-framing … thinking “one is bound to be good.” These days he shoots fewer frames in digital, with packed memory cards and the vision of weeks spent trawling through the mountain of files. With digital he can also replicate the film trick of bracketting exposures. As he says, he would much prefer to snare one perfect shot than a pile of average ones.

He explains that he always uses evaluative or matrix metering with his Canon EOS1Ds MkIII: by checking the display he can ascertain any areas of extreme under or over-exposure, then apply compensation. He always shoots RAW, acknowledging they record “robust shadows but fragile highlights.”

He finds wildlife photography to be a challenge: as a landscape photographer his approach is different, with a need to involve the animals in their environment — but he does admit that if he finished his career by not shooting a leopard with a long lens he’d feel he’d missed something. Except for three shots in the book taken with wide angle zooms, the remainder were captured with a 500mm tele. If in Rome…

We then get to trek through Laos, parts of France, Italy, Canada, the UK and Bolivia.

Much of the book includes personal notes on how to gear up for a shoot and how to overcome lassitude when things don’t go to plan. In Morocco he declares that he is frustrated by petty officialdom. In Bali it rained continuously for days and he shot virtually nothing at first. In Wales he sits morosely in the pub, again staring at the rain-drenched windows. His response most of the time is to stay positive, make location searches and hope that the clouds will part.

An unusual book, eighty per cent pleasure with twenty per cent encouragement, it’s the sort of work that you could enjoy while the rain pours and you wait to go outdoors.

Author: D Noton.
Publisher: David & Charles.
Length: 191 pages.
ISBN: 978 1 0 7153 3615 1.
Price: Get a Price on Photography Essentials Full Frame at Amazon

Post from: Digital Photography School's Photography Tips. Check out our resources on Portrait Photography Tips, Travel Photography Tips and Understanding Digital Cameras.

Photography Essentials Full Frame [Book Review]

An inexperienced photographer might find it very difficult to properly direct a model for great poses that will enhance the model’s presentation, showing her best face and figure, and most importantly convey the photographer’s message. Model Posing Guides & Tips software called the Model Pose 1.1 pro by Photocrack comes with around 200 posing [...]