Journal | A genius, so to speak, for sauntering

Wrangling Digital Colors

Monday · September 28, 2009 | posted under: Digital Alterations | 0 comments

Fall Leaves | Eagle River, Alaska

The above photo has been digitally altered with the intent of making is look more like the way I see. Camera manufacturers are in the hands of market forces and one of the unfortunate consequences is the difficulty in getting subtle colors from a digital SLR today. Below is a jpeg rendering of the RAW image using Adobe's 'standard' profile for this camera. The only changes are a slight color temperature adjustment to account for the shade and a little sharpening to regain detail after resizing it for the web. The colors are all over the place. In the world of hi-fi sound people often describe a speaker or amplifier as fatiguing to the listener. This is how I feel about the raw images I often see from cameras at all levels of the market; the images are tinny and strident. While a camera reviewer might sing the praises of the punchy colors and amateur photographers punch them up even further, I often find myself wishing for a digital sensor that saw the world more like a well-made C-print.

jpeg rendering of raw file

Many of the colors can be wrangled back to earth with a quick saturation adjustment, but this often renders the image a little lifeless to my eye. I've found that photoshop's layer blending modes provide more flexibility though admittedly at the expense of some added complication.

Here is a quick diagram of various layers and blend modes that went into this experiment just to bring it to a neutral place where I can look at without feeling attacked by the color. As you can see a very flexible way of controlling saturation and contrast simultaneously is by using a semi-transparent black and white image (all contained in Group 1). This works fine for situations like this and can perform miracles on skin tones that have been mangled by overachieving digital cameras and color profiles.