When PhotoShop Can’t Compensate For Inaccurate Exposure
Reducing The Number Of Colours
Creates The Illusion Of A Hand-Toned Image
Its been dark and stormy for the past two days here at Amos Bay, near Turunç, Marmaris. As a result I’ve been relaxing in the warmth of the Habit Bar with both Irem and Amazon. It was there that Irem grabbed the Fuji FinePix E900 and took this image of Amazon and I watching a TV program about Harley Davidson choppers.
Unfortunately it’s a classic example of when it would have been useful to over-ride the camera’s automatic settings. Amazon and I are illuminated by the window light from our immediate right. The bar itself is much darker, but has been well exposed by the camera automatically selecting ISO 800 as the digital speed. The result is that many of the highlights have burnt out. Not a disaster perhaps in this picture, but with a little on-camera preparation some of the problem could have been avoided.
The picture was ‘snapped’ as a .jpg image, and processed in the camera so I have no access to the camera RAW data. Nevertheless two quite different interpretations came to mind once I loaded Adobe PhotoShop.
In the first of these, (above), I changed the mode to ‘Indexed Colour’ and reduced the number of colours to 64. This produced an image that as if it has been sepia toned and hand coloured.
In the second interpretation I took the original .jpg in RGB mode and increased the saturation, and darkened the image. This would have worked better if the highlights weren’t so over-exposed but the effect still reflects the mood of the day.
It’s possible to do quite a bit to ‘rescue a poorly exposed image using an image editor such as Adobe PhotoShop, but where gross over, or under, exposure has occurred no image editing software help you.
Better instead learn how to recognise difficult lighting conditions and know how to manage them when taking the shot!
Increasing The Colour Saturation
Helps Create A More Atmospheric Image
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February 9th, 2006 at 1:39 pm
[...] Continuing from Monday’s entry, I’d just like to mention that there is a third way to improve photographs in which one area may be overexposed, and therefore bleached out to white. [...]