Newbie question about picturing in sunlight

J

JMOrem

New member
Hello all,

I am new here, and new to photography in general. I have myself a basic Nikon D3100.

I picture my personal cars outdoors at my building and the only color I have a problem with is red. My white, black and blue stuff picutres flawlessley. However when I picture a red car they show up hazy and with an orange hue. Any necessary adjustments I can do in the camera settings to bring out the red more?

Picture attached to show the quality.

Thanks in advance!
 

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W

WayneF

Senior Member
Your red is overexposed a bit (and clipped), which is a usual case. Red things (like closeup of roses) are especially prone to overexposure.

Watch your camera histogram to detect clipping, and back off a bit when it occurs (and try again). But DO NOT watch the single gray camera histogram. It is merely a math abstraction, not real data, and it shows nothing of interest, and especially it does not show clipping.

Only watch the three individual RGB histograms, which do show the real data.

Two types of Histograms

You can see this now on your image in a photo editor (like Adobe) that can show the individual red, green, blue channels of the histogram. Red is clipped, due to overexposure.

As we increase exposure, our histogram data moves right. Bright things normally should closely approach the right border edge, but should NOT pile up tall there due to clipping.

If you have Adobe, in the Levels histogram, hold down the ALT key and slide the White Point slightly left, and it will show you which pixels are being clipped (by that new position of the White Point).
 
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J

JMOrem

New member
WayneF said:
Your red is overexposed a bit (and clipped), which is a usual case. Red things (like closeup of roses) are especially prone to overexposure.

Watch your camera histogram to detect clipping, and back off a bit when it occurs (and try again). But DO NOT watch the single gray camera histogram. It is merely a math abstraction, not real data, and it shows nothing of interest, and especially it does not show clipping.

Only watch the three individual RGB histograms, which do show the real data.

Two types of Histograms

You can see this now on your image in a photo editor (like Adobe) that can show the individual red, green, blue channels of the histogram. Red is clipped, due to overexposure.

As we increase exposure, our histogram data moves right. Bright things normally should closely approach the right border edge, but should NOT pile up tall there due to clipping.

If you have Adobe, in the Levels histogram, hold down the ALT key and slide the White Point slightly left, and it will show you which pixels are being clipped (by that new position of the White Point).
Click to expand...

Thank you, how is it that I adjust this?

Thanks again
 
W

WayneF

Senior Member
JMOrem said:
Thank you, how is it that I adjust this?

Thanks again
Click to expand...

Sorry to say that it is really too late now. The correct time is in the field when taking the picture, with opportunity for a second corrected try.

As we increase camera exposure, the histogram data is shifted right, to be brighter. But when the value hits the right edge at 255, it cannot go higher. So it just piles up in a tall spike there at the right edge, at 255. Maybe it ought to be 260 or 270 or more, but digital numbers simply cannot store brighter than 255. This is called clipping, the 270 data is clipped to be only 255. The color is modified, perhaps only in the red channel. And if red is modified independently of blue and green, this changes the color. And that additional (excessive) exposure is gone now, no way now to know what it should have been. It cannot be restored. The solution is another picture with a more careful exposure.

There are photo editor tools that will reduce the red level, like 255 to be only 245. But that leaves a gap between 245 and 255... There is no way to restore clipped colors. Sometimes the colors can be faked there, to look some more desired way.

So... clipping is an extremely important thing to watch when taking pictures. If our exposure is simply off a bit, too dark or maybe too bright, we can often just shift it more appropriately. But not if it has been clipped, it is gone now.

This is why the camera shows the histogram, so we can check it then and there. We typically do want the data to extend generally high there (near the right border), but touching it, and actual clipping is really the only thing of interest. Lack of Clipping is extremely important to verify. But watch the three RGB channels, and NOT the gray single histogram (which shows nothing).

We can set the camera rear LCD image view to blink on overexposed (clipped) areas, but we can only set one of the red or green or blue channels. Red seems a good choice, but bright blue and green can also clip. Setting blinkies in the single gray channel is pointless, the one gray channel is something very different, not of interest.
 
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