|
|
How do I make the sky Blue?
|
|
|
|
Mac Elite
Join Date: Apr 2001
Status:
Offline
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Administrator
Join Date: Jun 2000
Location: California
Status:
Offline
|
|
You need a camera with a wide dynamic range. DSLRs have wider range than most compacts. The problem is the sky is too bright compared to the foreground subjects - if the camera does not have the range to include both, the sky will get clipped. Along with anything else that is too bright after the camera adjusts for the subjects.
You can fake it by shooting brightly lit subjects, but anything dark in the picture (shadow under a tree for example) will get clipped to black. It is a camera sensor problem.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Feb 2001
Location: Your Anus
Status:
Offline
|
|
Get your light reading from the sky not the foreground. It's hard to do with a point and shoot.
|
My sig is 1 pixel too big.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Clinically Insane
Join Date: Jun 2001
Location: planning a comeback !
Status:
Offline
|
|
The iOS 4's HDR camera function will help.
Even better, get an app like Pro HDR.
-t
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Mac Elite
Join Date: Apr 2001
Status:
Offline
|
|
I have the new sony nex slr like camera. It has the large sensor but the pics are only slightly better. Is there any specific settings that make the difference?
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Moderator Emeritus
Join Date: Mar 2004
Location: Copenhagen
Status:
Offline
|
|
Originally Posted by el chupacabra
I have the new sony nex slr like camera. It has the large sensor but the pics are only slightly better. Is there any specific settings that make the difference?
Most likely not, though ‘outdoors’ and ‘bright’ settings are usually at least somewhat better than the default standard mode.
If possible, like ort888 said, measure the light based more on the sky than the subjects. The subjects will likely end up looking a bit dark, but that’s a lot easier to fix afterwards than a blown-out sky. If you’re taking pictures of people and you’re able to control the flash on your camera (I don’t know if that’s possible on the Sony NEX), you can also take the picture with a flash on, while basing the light on the sky. That way, the overall light in the scene will be based on the sky (i.e., the camera will be very insensitive to light, and it’ll take bright light, like the sky, to get normally exposed colours); meanwhile the foreground subjects—who would normally be way too dark with such low light sensitivity, since they’re a lot darker than the sky—are illuminated by the flash and become more or less correctly exposed. This does depend on being able to control the flash, though, which seems to be rather rare for on-board flashes. If you can only set the flash to ‘on’ or ‘off’, chances are it’ll be several orders of magnitude too powerful, and you’ll end up with the foreground too bright instead.
Also, if you can, keep the Sun in your back. If the Sun gets anywhere in the shot, it’ll throw the light completely off balance and you’ll either have foreground subjects that are totally black, or a sky that’s totally white.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Banned
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Indy.
Status:
Offline
|
|
Originally Posted by ort888
Get your light reading from the sky not the foreground. It's hard to do with a point and shoot.
^^^Mostly this^^^
Hold on, let me go snap some shots before the sun goes down.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Moderator Emeritus
Join Date: Mar 2004
Location: Copenhagen
Status:
Offline
|
|
RR, if you’re going to post a thorough explanation with pictures as illustrations, could you do it in the photography tips sticky thread and just link to it from here? That would be great (and add a bit more to a very useful thread).
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posting Junkie
Join Date: Apr 2007
Location: Iowa, how long can this be? Does it really ruin the left column spacing?
Status:
Offline
|
|
I've heard something about polarizing lenses before...
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Administrator
Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: San Antonio TX USA
Status:
Offline
|
|
From a technical standpoint, I want to add to reader50's point: the camera needs a wide dynamic range-but for both brightness and color. Not all sensors are good at quantifying the difference between two colors that are close together-as in the second picture's difference between the middle of the sky and the water directly under it. Color range will help you get the saturation you want, but you also need wide brightness range to be able to capture details in lower lit areas. The kicker is that it isn't all the sensor that's responsible for this stuff. The camera's logic processes the raw data (even just going to RAW format) and uses camera settings to filter that raw data, so some cameras can make much better pictures than others with basically the same sensor.
|
Glenn -----OTR/L, MOT, Tx
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Banned
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Indy.
Status:
Offline
|
|
Originally Posted by Oisín
RR, if you’re going to post a thorough explanation with pictures as illustrations, could you do it in the photography tips sticky thread and just link to it from here? That would be great (and add a bit more to a very useful thread).
Not the best work I have ever done, but here it is: http://forums.macnn.com/83/art-and-g...s/#post4017606
The sun had actually set, so it is not a very good example, but it does kind of show what others have said on here earlier. The key is where you meter the capture.
Originally Posted by Laminar
I've heard something about polarizing lenses before...
Yes, for landscapes with big sky views, a polarizing filter (if not overdone) will yield the best results.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Banned
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Indy.
Status:
Offline
|
|
Originally Posted by ghporter
From a technical standpoint, I want to add to reader50's point: the camera needs a wide dynamic range-but for both brightness and color. Not all sensors are good at quantifying the difference between two colors that are close together-as in the second picture's difference between the middle of the sky and the water directly under it. Color range will help you get the saturation you want, but you also need wide brightness range to be able to capture details in lower lit areas. The kicker is that it isn't all the sensor that's responsible for this stuff.
Most sensors, including in a modest point and shoot, have pretty wide dynamic ranges.
Originally Posted by ghporter
The camera's logic processes the raw data (even just going to RAW format) and uses camera settings to filter that raw data, so some cameras can make much better pictures than others with basically the same sensor.
Well... not really. RAW, in essence, is what the camera saw. Some data is passed onto the software regarding some settings such as white balance, but you can zero those out and get exactly what the sensor captured. If you capture in manual with WB set to sunlight and all other setting set to neutral, you'll have a good starting point for fine image work.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Banned
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Indy.
Status:
Offline
|
|
Originally Posted by el chupacabra
ALL of those above have been post processed to make the sky bluer. The links from the pbase gallery aren't as bad, but the others are horrendous.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Administrator
Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: San Antonio TX USA
Status:
Offline
|
|
Originally Posted by Railroader
Most sensors, including in a modest point and shoot, have pretty wide dynamic ranges.
Wide, but not necessarily uniform. Sensors can pick up say indigo and dark blue and violet all at once, but not all sensors, even in "good" cameras, can produce the same differentiation between these close values; sensor color bias is a characteristic of individual sensor designs, and the A-D processor used with an individual sensor will adjust individual sensor pixel color data to make it more uniform.
Originally Posted by Railroader
Well... not really. RAW, in essence, is what the camera saw. Some data is passed onto the software regarding some settings such as white balance, but you can zero those out and get exactly what the sensor captured. If you capture in manual with WB set to sunlight and all other setting set to neutral, you'll have a good starting point for fine image work.
In addition to pre-processing color data, A-D processors can differ in their A/D algorithm and bit depth, which affects color representation. White balance is more "range adjustment" than "processing," but it affects both brightness and color encoding. ISO setting also requires processing before producing the RAW image file.
I'm not nit picking, just providing a little background for my point of view in my earlier post. I've always been a hardware guy, and these details make a difference to me. The output of the sensor really isn't available until it's been processed at least a little, usually a lot. Of course I may have "bought the marketing line" with saying some cameras could produce "much better" pictures than others with essentially the same sensor. Without access to what the A-D processor sees, there's no real way to quantify how two different implementations using the same sensor differ-what you get out is necessarily a product of the whole camera.
Techy dweeb is shutting up now...
|
Glenn -----OTR/L, MOT, Tx
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posting Junkie
Join Date: Jun 2002
Location: Calgary
Status:
Offline
|
|
One other thing I've noticed: some people, when noticing how white the sky is in their photos, don't realize that the day was very hazy when they took the shot. People remember overcast skies, but they seldom seem to notice light haze, where they sky is blue overhead but white at the horizon where our cameras are pointed.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Banned
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Indy.
Status:
Offline
|
|
A polarizing filter will reduce that significantly.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Banned
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Indy.
Status:
Offline
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Jan 2007
Status:
Offline
|
|
The bets answers are all here.
First and foremost, circular polarizing filter....
Without a polarizing filter and then with...
Again...
Big difference, huh?
You want the circular kind, linear polarizers are for more manually adjusting to a specific situation.
Other suggestions of taking the light readings from the sky and post processing are huge help as well.
BTW, sorry to butt in, i've been away from macnn for a while (my mac pro is 1.1 and there isn't much new info about it these days), but I did want to see what others were saying about 10.7, so I'm looking around.
(
Last edited by wyatt; Oct 22, 2010 at 03:56 AM.
)
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Moderator Emeritus
Join Date: Mar 2004
Location: Copenhagen
Status:
Offline
|
|
By all means, butt away! That’s what forums are for, after all: butts.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Mac Elite
Join Date: Nov 2006
Location: here
Status:
Offline
|
|
Looks like the washed out images of the OP were made in a completely different light (with overcast sky).
Or he shot it with such a bad camera with a tiny sensor that has a very low range of contrast, which means brighter parts of the image will soon blow out.
Generally, the images the OP posted and liked had enhanced saturation, which can be easily achieved with a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer in Photoshop. You can even target the blue and only enhance the blue. Also the color temperature in the OP's images is freezing cold, which is why it kills all color. Typical result of a bad automatic white balance function.
Also, the "liked by OP" shots were taken in the afternoon, the sun coming from behind or from the side, and the OP seems to prefer shooting into the sun.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Forum Rules
|
|
|
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts
|
HTML code is Off
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|