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Effect of light on colour


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I was taking some pics in the garden today, looking for autumn colour, and decided to take one of the car. The sun was bright but very low and was giving me hard shadows across the car. I decided to wait for a cloud to cover the sun so that I got flatter light and the picture below is the result.

 

Notice how blue the car looks, because it is lit by dispersed light from the intensely blue sky. The garage door has retained its white colour and I can only assume that is because it is much less reflective than the shiny metallic paint on the car.

 

20101106AutumnCar.jpg

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Here are some of the images I was taking when I stopped to take the car pic.

 

We have a Liquidamber in the back garden that I planted in 1978. It always gives good value at this time of the year, especially when the sun is shining as it did this morning. The range of colours in the leaves, once they start to turn is amazing.

 

20101106Liquidamber01.jpg

 

20101106Liquidamber02.jpg

 

20101106Liquidamber03.jpg

 

20101106Liquidamber04.jpg

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  • 4 weeks later...
Was a bit difficult to get any real colour this morning...

 

Snow is quite difficult to photograph accurately. Do you have any control over "white balance" in your processing software, that might help.

 

Incidentally, that "C" shaped blur on the horison and to the right in your picture looks like some muck on the camera sensor. I can see some in the second picture also, but in a different place. Have the pics been cropped?

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Forgive me for fiddling. I thought it might be interesting to see the effect of changing the colour balance a little. The dark areas top right and bottom left don't help - what are they?

 

You're welcome. That's certainly made it a lot more colourful than it was in reality, but the original pic wasn't too far from how it seemed - very grey! The dark bits are probably bits of snow on the lense as hopefully I'm past the point where I leave a finger in the way. Best cropped, but I forgot to do so.

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  • 3 weeks later...

If you have access to paintshop pro or adobe photoshop, try using the levels tool.

(normally under Image, adjustments.)

 

there are 3 little triangles under the histogram, left is for shadows, middle is for mid tones, and right is for highlights.

 

Good starting point is to move the highlights to meet the edge of the rightmost point of the histogram.

 

Another tip for snow photography is to over expose by 1 stop. (if your camera allows.)

Tip I learnt whilst in Antarctica.

 

Love the dog photo by the way ;)

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