New on Alamy, I'm sure my portfolio has some major flaws, please let me know!

[Normspics]

When auto metering a snow scene it nearly always needs a +75 stop of light to compensate for the camera meter trying to medium grey (18% grey), everything. In the photo above with red buildings you could try in Photoshop Mode> Adjustment> Exposure and use the highlight dropper to click on the snowy roof to brighten things up.

[Ognyan Yosifov]

On 10/01/2024 at 12:55, Steve F said:

 

My Sony A7iii also has a blue shift for its auto white balance. 

 

Looks ok. Could be maybe a quarter stop brighter and I know it's a spring image so the light is less warm, but it looks a bit shifted towards the blue side.

 

 

Direct setting sun on buildings, I would expect the buildings to be brighter. Would also up the exposure on this. Looks a bit blue, but not so sure, I'd play with the sliders. In Lightroom, I'd also select the sky under 'masking' and play with the dehaze and up the saturation a bit.

 

I'm estimating underexposed at least a stop. Looks like the exposure is directly from the camera - which has assumed the scene is a mid grey.

 

 

In the end, there is only one rule: try to present the photo in the way you experienced the scene at the time of taking the shot. So, in that order, there is only one witness to it - the photographer!

[John a N]

2 hours ago, Normspics said:

When auto metering a snow scene it nearly always needs a +75 stop of light to compensate for the camera meter trying to medium grey (18% grey), everything. In the photo above with red buildings you could try in Photoshop Mode> Adjustment> Exposure and use the highlight dropper to click on the snowy roof to brighten things up.

Thanks, for the tip!

I mainly use LR for editing and the auto-white balance does not do well with my aerial drone shots 😄, it adds even more blue tint, making for some rather apocalyptic scenes... It does OK with other photos tho, with some manual tinkering afterwards. 

[Steve F]

7 minutes ago, John a N said:

I mainly use LR for editing and the auto-white balance does not do well with my aerial drone shots

 

I almost exclusively use LR (photoshop idiot). Auto White balance is not great, I generally always use the white eye dropper / judge by eye.

Edited January 12 by Steve F

[MDM]

5 hours ago, Normspics said:

When auto metering a snow scene it nearly always needs a +75 stop of light to compensate for the camera meter trying to medium grey (18% grey), everything. In the photo above with red buildings you could try in Photoshop Mode> Adjustment> Exposure and use the highlight dropper to click on the snowy roof to brighten things up.

 

I presume that is a typo. Do you mean 0.75 stops. I would say a lot more - 2 to 3 stops depending on the dynamic range ability of one's camera. 

 

3 hours ago, Steve F said:

 

I almost exclusively use LR (photoshop idiot). Auto White balance is not great, I generally always use the white eye dropper / judge by eye.

 

The eyedropper is fantastic but you still need a truly neutral area in the image and that can be hard to judge. That is where the grey card or CCP comes in.  For a lot of shots it is not that important of course. I would never use auto white balance in Lightroom or Photoshop ACR though 

Edited January 12 by MDM

[Normspics]

3 hours ago, MDM said:

 

I presume that is a typo. Do you mean 0.75 stops. I would say a lot more - 2 to 3 stops depending on the dynamic range ability of one's camera. 

 

You need to increase exposure for snow .75 to one stop

[MDM]

1 hour ago, Normspics said:

You need to increase exposure for snow .75 to one stop

 

Ok. Reading what I wrote,  it looks like I was saying minus - the - was a dash. I would go more than one stop if spot metering on snow. I would open up (overexpose) by 2 stops at least if not more. 

[M.Chapman]

A simple exposure adjustment to this image risks blowing out the highlights before revealing the detail in the subject. It needs the mid-tones and shadows lifting in addition. The same comment applies to a number of pictures in the OP's portfolio where contrasty conditions have left the subject in shadow.

 

Mark

Edited January 13 by M.Chapman

[spacecadet]

In LR I've tried this one with my usual method of applying auto tone, then adjusting exposure and highlights down.

Unlike some I find auto tone useful. This may mean that my exposure is off but at normal ISOs I'm not too worried about it. Auto Tone at high ISO is a bit horrorshow on the A58.

Edited January 13 by spacecadet

[M.Chapman]

28 minutes ago, spacecadet said:

Unlike some I find auto tone useful.

+1

[John a N]

After some soul searching I came up with this result, that I find more balanced and more in line with what my eyes saw that day.

 

 

 

 

On the same note I went through a few others like this example:

Edited January 14 by John a N
typos

[NYCat]

Those look really good to me. Some of the guys are more expert than I am but they sure look better to my eye.

 

Paulette

[StokeCreative]

43 minutes ago, NYCat said:

Those look really good to me. Some of the guys are more expert than I am but they sure look better to my eye.

 

Paulette

+1

The whites are whiter in the first image 👍  (perhaps the red still a little bit muddy?) second image is much more appealing than before

.

Edited January 14 by StokeCreative

[MDM]

5 hours ago, John a N said:

After some soul searching I came up with this result, that I find more balanced and more in line with what my eyes saw that day.

 

Yes that is a massive improvement. In the first image, the snow is coloured white instead of having a bluish cast and there is a much better tonal range from black to white with little or no highlight clipping compared to your example above as well as the modified version by spacecadet. These have a strong blue cast and the tonal range is too narrow with no proper whites. 

 

In my opinion, the best approach when working on raw files is to set the white balance first, then use the Exposure slider to lighten the image to a point where the highlights are white (on the histogram), then pull back the highlights a little using the Highlights slider to a point where one is seeing detail in the highlights. Then work the midtones and the shadows and add or reduce contrast to taste, preferably using the Curves. This assumes that there are highlights in the image so does not apply to low contrast images of course. 

 

The second image is also way better with a nice blue sky rather than the muddy sky in the previous version. 

 

A couple of things to keep in mind. Firstly, if shooting a scene, particularly a snow scene, that has sunny areas and shadow areas, the shadow areas will have a natural blue cast which our eyes adjust to in the flesh but which is very obvious with snow in photos, as it really shows up any colour cast. This is fine - I don't think there is any need to correct it. However, if shooting a scene with no direct sunlight, as in the first shot, it is important to correct the colour so the snow looks white rather than blue. Secondly if shooting a sunset ot sunrise where the light is naturally warm and orange, one does not normally want to correct or over-correct this to make it neutral, as that can destroy the atmosphere of the scene. 

Edited January 14 by MDM

[MDM]

On 10/01/2024 at 17:47, wiskerke said:

They are not that cheap. Plus they do degrade over time.

 

wim

 

I have an older one from around 2015 (says 2014 on it) which has seen quite a bit of usage outdoors and one from 2020 (the revised 2019 edition) which has spent most of its life packed away. After reading your comment, I decided to photograph the two togther in the same  ight to see what differences might show up using the Color Sampler tool in Photoshop which allows you to place up to 10 spots on an image and display the values in the Info panel.

 

There are some differences, more in the colour patches than the neutral patches. I don't know if there were any changes made in the design or if this is due to wear. In some cases the older one is less saturated than the newer one but the opposite also occurs. If one was doing extremely accurate and precise colour work, then there might be problems.

 

However, the older one remains neutral in the neutral patches so it would stlll be fine to use for setting white balance. It is consistently very slightly darker than the newer one for the neutral patches when measured, although the differences are probably imperceptible by eye and of no consequence for most purposes. 

Edited January 15 by MDM