Sheep and Lambs

[Lesley Jones]

I've been out and about this afternoon, which is why I've been quieter in here tonight. There are a few images I need to tinker with. This is probably my least favourite, but the lambs are cute, so I will put it up anyway. Question for someone - my Sony shoots very yellow in situations like this with back lit grass. It takes a lot of work to remove the almost fluorescent glow. Has anyone experienced it and more to the point, is there anything I can do to stop it?

 

[Chris Dodkin]

Lesley - what a lovely family portrait - so cute!

Great eye contact as well.

I bet this would look stunning in B&W - what do you think?

regarding color cast - are you using auto white balance when you shoot?

If so, selecting Daylight instead of Auto might fix the issue.

 

[Lesley Jones]

Cheers Chris! I've already tried a conversion, but it wasn't working for me and I have new images I want to work on. It's not that I don't care, but I'm already stressed up to my eyeballs with the animals and battling with an image isn't high on my priorities. Maybe if I had a bit more time...

It's not so much a colour cast, but just that the backlit grass goes berserk. Far too bright and intense. I had one with Lola ferret coming through the daffodil leaves and I think I had to turn down the yellow in hue and saturation about 50%. Close up leaves respond quite well to that, but grass is different. Toned down, especially with no other colour, it looks drab. On this one I reduced yellow and green, but also turned down the lightness. I had to blur the background and chuck a load of negative tonal contrast at it too. I have a couple of one lamb on his own, so at least I have the smart filters to follow.

It's just a quirk of the camera I guess

 

[Chris Dodkin]

Could be that the green in the grass is over saturating just the green channel - giving you an odd color that's outside of the normal color space.

Are you able to see separate RGB histograms for the image either in camera or in PP software?

If the green channel is over saturated, you'll see it in the green histogram - A fix could be to deliberately underexpose the image to avoid the green channel maxing out - then recover the image in post processing where you have more control.

Might work - I've had similar issues with hard reds on flowers.

 

[Lesley Jones]

Are you able to see separate RGB histograms for the image either in camera or in PP software?

If the green channel is over saturated, you'll see it in the green histogram - A fix could be to deliberately underexpose the image to avoid the green channel maxing out - then recover the image in post processing where you have more control.

To answer your question, yes I can see separate histograms, but I'm not entirely sure what an over saturated channel looks like. As an old user of slide film, I still prefer to underexpose slightly, but as the Sony is a few years old, it suffers more from noise than newer cameras I think. I guess it's not a huge problem - I'll just have to find a recipe to calm down the colour. I have a couple more of a single lamb to do tonight, so I should at least get some practice

 

[Brian Moore]

Delightful portrait, Lesley. The eye contact is very good, as Chris pointed out, and mammy's blue earring is a nice touch for Mother's Day (which is today, in USA).

 

[Lesley Jones]

Ah yes... the blue ear tag. If the government get their way we'll have to have our llamas done too. That could prove interesting...