Color correction

Yeah, that 2nd car shot looks overexposed. Maybe not as much as 1 stop.

The only setting I altered on my camera is the exposure value…I shoot 1/3rd under. In this way, I reduce the danger of an overexposure and 1/3rd can v. easily be pulled back in PS.
All other settings are at neutral or nil.

to me that’s over exposed , the trouble with auto on cameras is they mostly give an average meter reading wich is fine in most cases but it can often be wrong

with many problems with auto programes on my nikon dslr i soon returned to my fully manual shooting ways from my film days

my reasoning is that a dslr is a tool for your own creativity so why spend all that money then let the camera do the same as a compact would !!

I wonder if the OP is using a similar feature on his camera and has it set to ‘vivid’. Just a thought.

Regards

No. Just out of the box.

But I did realize the photo I posted above wasn’t typical, it was one I was experimenting with in the computer, I hit “Auto Correct” and it gives a more “vivid” look.

Here’s a more typical example of my problem. Not as overexposed as the first photo. Again, the colour should be a strawberry red.

A skylight filter just warms up the picture a tiny little bit. It can be used in digital, but the same effect can just as easy be accomplished in post processing. In digital photography a skylight filter as a precaution to UV induced unsharpness is also useless, because the sensor is not sensible to UV light anyway. The drawback of any filter is that it introduces two additional planes through which the light has to pass, with increased risks to diminished contrast and sharpness and flare. My advice, if there’s nothing to filter don’t use one.

The Skylight filter reduced the colour temperature, so that on a cloudless summer day the photo was a lot less blue. I agree with your comment on filters re the two additional planes and I am interested that sensors are not affected by UV light. Thank you for that.

My camera, nothing special, just a Canon S5 IS, permits a photo to be changed on board as it were. I wonder if the OP is using a similar feature on his camera and has it set to ‘vivid’. Just a thought.

Regards

White balance – your camera needed to see some white to determine the correct temperature correction.

The Red is over saturated. Something to bear in mind is that the Unsharp mask method of sharpening actually makes this saturation worse. There are alternative methods to sharpening a picture such as Lab mode/High Pass Filtering.

A skylight filter just warms up the picture a tiny little bit. It can be used in digital, but the same effect can just as easy be accomplished in post processing. In digital photography a skylight filter as a precaution to UV induced unsharpness is also useless, because the sensor is not sensible to UV light anyway. The drawback of any filter is that it introduces two additional planes through which the light has to pass, with increased risks to diminished contrast and sharpness and flare. My advice, if there’s nothing to filter don’t use one.

Could you use a Skylight filter or don’t they work in digital?

Sorry if this seems to be a little daft but although I use a bridge (Canon S5 IS) I’m very much an analogue man at heart.

Regards

I was taking photos of my newly restored old car and was disappointed that the car’s color came out so off.

The problem of the red colour could be dealt with by:

a. exposure
Obviously the photograph of the car is clearly overexposed. Overexposure results in clipping of one ore more of the Red, Green and Blue channels of the camera’s sensor. Unfortunately in most cases the Red channel is the first one to blow, resulting in loss of detail and colour shift in the reds. You can avoid overexposure and clipping by looking at the histogram of a picture. Example

Watch the red “spike” on the right side of the histogram, which indicates red channel clipping. This can be dimished, or even completely avoided, by lowering the exposure. This can be done by switching the camera to manual mode and setting an exposure or by dialing in an minus exposure correction (e.g. EV – 0.3, -0.5, -.07). Make a series of exposures with different exposure correction factors and each time watch the histogram! If the picture seems to come out a little too dark, don’t panic! To a considerable degree this can be corrected in post processing.

b. white balance
As mentioned above, a correct white balance is also very important to make sure that colours will be displayed correctly. Auto white balance will not always deliver a satisfactory result. You could try to improve the colour rendering by setting an alternative WB, e.g. Daylight, Cloudy and look at the result on your LCD screen (live view mode). Decide what you like best.
It usually is also possible to make a custom white balance, by shooting a neutral grey or white reference card. Unfortunately the mentioned Kodak Gray Card was not designed for white balancing, but for exposure purposes. Its grey is not completely neutral. There are better options, like the cards from WhiBal
http://www.whibalhost.com/_Tutorials/WhiBal/01/

If you don’t have a calibrated grey card, a piece of white printing paper might give a satisfactory result as well.

If your camera supports photography in RAW, always select that option. It allows you to make corrections to white balance and exposure in post processing. However it always remains important to be careful in the shooting stage and to use the information provided by the histogram.

Edit: Colour rendition
In the automatic modes, especially point-and-shoot camera’s often select a vivid colour rendition with saturated colours, which could contribute in blowing e.g. the Red channel. This can be avoided by manually selecting colour mode Neutral, or to set-up a Custom Color rendition in which you adjust contrast and saturation to your own liking. See your SD1300 IS manual!!

not often i’ll say this but peedee is correct to some degree he is correct about the grey card and grass being great to meter from tarmac also falls in there and some concrete surfaces

he’s correct about the sun at mid day if you absolutely have to shoot at that time an overcast day is better as cloud cover difuses the harsh sunlight hence difrent white balance settings for cloud and sunlight

mornings or prefrebly evenings are far better for light though

it isn’t realy a case of knowing how to use the camera ( that will give fine results as good as dslrs given it’s correct working field )

it isn’t even realy a case of knowing how to use photoshop ( a bad picture is still a bad picture even after photoshop manipulation )

it comes down to the basic knowledge that was as true on film as it is on digital

knowing what is good light to shoot in

” there’s only one good thing to do with a camera around mid day , and that’s leave it in your bag !!”

You need to buy a Grey Card, made by Kodak. Gray Card might be the mispelling on the box.

A raw image, in Lightroom or photoshop can be corrected for just about any colour problem, but you need to know what you are doing with the histograms and such.

As for the car, 1 hour before sunset has a temperature of something like 3,500 deg Kelvin whereas noon is about 5,500 degrees.
The automatic parts of a camera will always try and give a neutral white balance but this is probably not what you needed for the car shot.
Unfortunately, Reds and Greens require a little more work in photoshop to get them right, even after you corrected the colour temperature generally.
Green grass is the colour equivelent of the 18% Grey (The Grey card again) so, take meter readings (With camera or light meter) off the grass then set those up in manual mode on camera. Obviously, if subject is in shade, find grass in shade.

it’s very little to do with the camera and is something hard to remedy even if shot in raw

it is more how some red paint pigments behave to cameras in bright sunlight

the best solution is to shoot on a more overcast day in less harsh light

i tried every trick in the book once on a fuji s8000 bridge camera the heli i was shooting was fire engine red

but the camera registered it as pink no matter what settings were used all the colour would turn out as was pink or magenta

also of note is that i struggled just as much with a dslr on a very simmilarly coloured heli in simmilar strong harsh light

by the time i had stepped the camera down enough to get the red the quality was awful

the red was too harsh with no depth and altering the white balance will only make other colours wrong

Thought so. Still prefer a Sting Ray. Assuming I had silly money to buy one! Last Avanti I’ve seen was at Marathon, on the Florida Keys about 12 years ago.

Avanti?

Yes, a 1963 R-1.

Avanti?

If using a point and shoot digital camera in auto mode, the colours will usually
tend to come out darker this time of the year, with the lower light levels.

I noticed this with my old Powershot. When taking pictures during the winter,
shots of the sea and sky would appear with really deep colours.
Try using manual mode, and play around with the exposure settings.

Tire shop surely? 😀

No sense of humour loss here, it was just too good an opportunity to miss

Moggy

You could add a ‘u’ between the ‘o’ and the ‘r’ :p

I thought of that after I posted…

Sorry, I was in a hurry to pick up my wife’s car at the tyre shop, and I was afraid some would lose your sense of humour.

You could add a ‘u’ between the ‘o’ and the ‘r’ :p

Every digital (and film for that matter) camera renders its own colour cast. You need to adjust the colour balance of your image in something like Photoshop to suit you…