Dangerspouse
Senior Member
This week's Photo Challenge was "Color Select", something I'd never tried before. I knew my camera (D5500) had that function available in the "Effects" dial, but I'd also read it could be done in Post Processing. I decided to compare the two methods to see if there was any difference, and thought some here might also find it interesting.
Not far from my house is the "Colored Cemetery", a historic final resting place for slaves and freed blacks that dates back to the mid-18th century. Many graves are completely unmarked, so white posts have been erected where testing has shown human remains lie below. There are a few graves that do have very small headstones, but there are two or three that are larger and have actual inscriptions. It's a solitary, somber place located in an out of the way rural area, but people come to leave memorial pebbles and other remembrance tokens on a regular basis.
On this day I brought along a bunch of poinsettias and laid one on the marker stone, the rest on various grave sites. I left them there after the shoot.
All these shots are focus stacked.
First up is the shot in color for reference:
The reference photo above processed in Lightroom by desaturating the entire scene and then using HSL to bring back anything red:
By contrast, this is using the in-camera color select function in the Effects dial:
What do you think? Personally I consider the in-camera processing to be superior to my Lightroom effort. In hindsight I should have further adjusted the scene in that second picture to bring out the words on the plaque, and sharpened the landscape, but after seeing that I couldn't bring back the original hue of the flowers I didn't bother. Not that the in-camera processing was spot on perfect - I think it over saturated the red a bit and made it somewhat artificially luminous - but overall it looks much more realistic than what I was able to achieve in PP.
BTW, it was a very windy day when I shot these. Windy enough that it caused some wobble apparently in my tripod. As these were all focus stacked, when Lightroom auto-aligned them it cut off part of my left border, apparently unable to blend them because of camera shake. So it looks like I missed the left side of the plaque when I framed the shot. I don't know why it only did it on the left side - maybe there was more contrast on that side or something? Either way, it's very frustrating to look at after I spent so long setting up the shot. Another effect of the wind: there was only one blade of grass sticking up in front of the plaque on the bottom right. But gusty winds while I was taking my reference photo stack whipped it back and forth so the camera caught it in several positions making the final photo look like there was an entire sheaf there, lol. The wind died down a bit when I took the pictures for the third photo, so it only looks like two. In retrospect I should have moved the stalk out of the way when I started, but I was so concentrating on the other factors that I completely overlooked it.
All in all, I'm glad I did this comparison. In the future I think I'll trust the camera's brain rather than my own if I ever want to do this type of photography again.
Not far from my house is the "Colored Cemetery", a historic final resting place for slaves and freed blacks that dates back to the mid-18th century. Many graves are completely unmarked, so white posts have been erected where testing has shown human remains lie below. There are a few graves that do have very small headstones, but there are two or three that are larger and have actual inscriptions. It's a solitary, somber place located in an out of the way rural area, but people come to leave memorial pebbles and other remembrance tokens on a regular basis.
On this day I brought along a bunch of poinsettias and laid one on the marker stone, the rest on various grave sites. I left them there after the shoot.
All these shots are focus stacked.
First up is the shot in color for reference:
The reference photo above processed in Lightroom by desaturating the entire scene and then using HSL to bring back anything red:
By contrast, this is using the in-camera color select function in the Effects dial:
What do you think? Personally I consider the in-camera processing to be superior to my Lightroom effort. In hindsight I should have further adjusted the scene in that second picture to bring out the words on the plaque, and sharpened the landscape, but after seeing that I couldn't bring back the original hue of the flowers I didn't bother. Not that the in-camera processing was spot on perfect - I think it over saturated the red a bit and made it somewhat artificially luminous - but overall it looks much more realistic than what I was able to achieve in PP.
BTW, it was a very windy day when I shot these. Windy enough that it caused some wobble apparently in my tripod. As these were all focus stacked, when Lightroom auto-aligned them it cut off part of my left border, apparently unable to blend them because of camera shake. So it looks like I missed the left side of the plaque when I framed the shot. I don't know why it only did it on the left side - maybe there was more contrast on that side or something? Either way, it's very frustrating to look at after I spent so long setting up the shot. Another effect of the wind: there was only one blade of grass sticking up in front of the plaque on the bottom right. But gusty winds while I was taking my reference photo stack whipped it back and forth so the camera caught it in several positions making the final photo look like there was an entire sheaf there, lol. The wind died down a bit when I took the pictures for the third photo, so it only looks like two. In retrospect I should have moved the stalk out of the way when I started, but I was so concentrating on the other factors that I completely overlooked it.
All in all, I'm glad I did this comparison. In the future I think I'll trust the camera's brain rather than my own if I ever want to do this type of photography again.