Red Highlights

[Daniel Browning]

Ah, so are you saying that, in terms of dynamic range and detail, it's generally better to overexpose and then dial back in the raw conversion?

Yes. When most folks do "ETTR", they don't realize that they are only doing ETTR for the JPEG on their camera, which is easily two stops off from the raw data (as in this case).

For web display, i'd assume that we'd be looking at sRGB or what have you.

Correct.

If that's the case, shouldn't all of these images look similar?

As Chuck said, the differences are due to different converters and different settings. Colors that can't be displayed in sRGB (such as the true saturated red of this flower captured by the raw file) can still be *mapped* to a similar color in sRGB. (Just as you can't take a picture of the sun and print it on paper that is bright enough to blind people: you have to "map" the brightness of the sun to a lower brightness on the paper because the paper just isn't capable of reproducing the natural world.)

Thanks for the pat. I did learn something today. I was glad I waited until I got home to look at some things before I posted. I was amazed to see those images on my new HP monitor. Obviously, we're all not seeing the same thing when it comes to high gamut renderings like these red flowers.

Yes, cheaper monitors and laptops (like my Macbook Pro) do an especially poor job. I'm using a NEC 2490WUXi, which has very good reproduction of sRGB.

On my HP2275w there is no visible clipping that I can see in the OP's image.

Pull it into photoshop and isolate the red channel to see the clipping. There are many areas with no detail (253+). The blue and green channels are fine, which is why we can still see some detail in those areas.

Of course, most monitors will show even more of it as blown (including blue and green channels) even though it isn't.

sRGB is as good as all the other color spaces when developing for the web.

I would add that most computers/browsers aren't color aware and so cannot deal with anything other than sRGB. But it would be possible to upload a 16-bit tiff that has a color space with a very wide gamut (e.g. BetaRGB) so that nothing was clipped in the image *file*. But to view it, the display has to convert it to sRGB anyway, and so it will get clipped. So unless it will be printed, it's better to do a quality conversion to sRGB (and avoid clipped colors) during raw conversion.

Daniel,

http://photography-on-the.net/forum/...d.php?t=485349

Is there any validity to this one. Like that poster, I'm lazy too.

Yes. Those instructions will often get your Uni-WB within 1/3 stop, which is close enough for most folks. The best method takes a little more work, but you only have to do it once in the life of the camera:

http://www.dpreview.com/forums/read....ssage=31582853

One of these days I'm going to try to build a Custom Picture Profile that does a reverse sRGB curve like so:

http://www.dpreview.com/forums/read....ssage=31842306

That would allow the histogram to be linear instead of gamma, which is much easier to see and use.

If your taking about the green cast white balance for accurate raw histograms,

Yes, that's precisely it.

I tried, but just couldn't get use to it.

The way I do it is to switch back and forth, because color is obviously an important part of composition.

The biggest thing that I keep messing up on is forgetting to shoot a white/gray card at the beginning of session.

Just make sure all your subjects wear something white. ("I hereby award you this commemorative white ribbon in honor of UniWB Awareness Day.")

We would all have a better idea of what color those red flowers really are!!

Indeed. One of those mysteries that keeps our interest. ("Were those skies really that purple? Or was it just Velvia film? We'll never know.")

Something, though, bothers me. While I'm all for tweaking images for the best representation of what we want to present, if different software takes the same data and, by default, presents a drastically different image in the same color space, then, technically speaking, I would think that means that they can't all be right, i.e., most, if not all of them, are wrong.

That's certainly a valid way to look at it. Technically, they're all wrong. All that matters is the one that gets in wrong in the most pleasing way.