On 8/15/2011 7:23 PM, Bruce Walker wrote:
I forgot a couple of advicelets:
Permanently set your WB to Cloudy. Weird advice huh? But here's the
thing: you are already shooting RAW (you are, I hope) and you can
always adjust the WB to whatever you want later. Cloudy is like "warm
daylight/flash" so it gives skin tones a healthy glow.
That's what I eventually settled on after getting some very, very cool
(and not in the colloquial sense) results from AWB. And I agree -- it
worked much better. I was able to salvage just about every shot I took,
and the skin tones were extremely natural-looking, if oversaturated --
which was my fault for not bumping it back down after ticking it up for
some flowers and such.
I wasn't shooting RAW on those shots, since I needed to turn them around
pretty quickly, but I have gotten into the habit of doing that these
days, after spending a year shooting strictly in JPEG under the false
impression that the K-x's compression engine was /just/ that good.
In that crazy room with mixed light sources, I imagine that on a sunny
or hazy day the windows will win and the light will be 70-80%
daylight-ish temp with "fill" from both fluorescent and tungsten. You
should be ok with Daylight or Cloudy.
You're going to have a lot of blue highlights from those dropped
tungsten lamps I bet. You could reduce the blue saturation in
Lightroom's colour tweaker sliders.
Unfortunately, I don't have LR. I'm still using an ancient copy of
Photoshop 7, which worked pretty well on those shots when I desaturated
it around 15 - 20% across the spectrum and then knocked the reds and
yellows down just a bit more on top of it. That really brought out the
detail, as well.
Here's another obscure one: take a shot of something neutral gray (I'm
assuming you didn't bring a gray card) and you can use that to improve
your WB later on (Lr or Ps). I find that the back covers of many
keyboards (musical ones) are gray. There's often one to be found on a
stage.
Great tip! I don't know why I hadn't thought of it. Definitely one to
file away for future reference.
Thanks again!
-- Walt
-bmw
On 11-08-15 7:39 PM, Walt Gilbert wrote:
Thanks for all the advice, Bruce.
I do most of those to one extent or the other, though I have a tough
time making myself bump the ISO up, even though the camera is capable
of it. I never go above 3200 unless it's just to show someone that
the camera will do it. I should probably get over that, huh?
Being prepared for the very small keeper rate, on the other hand --
that's my forte!
I usually keep my camera in center-weighted, average metering, as
I've been less than impressed with the matrix metering in the past.
And I agree that does tend to produce better results to my eye.
Where I have the most difficulty is in a situation like the one I was
in most recently -- indoors during mid-day, huge windows with lots of
sunlight under a hazy sky in a room with very high ceilings with
recessed fluorescent bulbs, plus dropped fixtures (about 7 ft or 2.5
m high) with incandescent bulbs, PLUS some very, very white light
spilling in from a kitchen area, just off to the right. All of this
in a room with fairly bright yellow walls.
I got some crazy-looking colors out of that one. The AWB just threw
up its hands and said, "Your guess is as good as mine, dude."
Thanks again!
Walt
On 8/15/2011 1:49 PM, Bruce Walker wrote:
Some quick advice, Walt.
Switch away from matrix metering; go with center-weighted or spot.
Chances are the stage lights are focused on the performers, so
they're the brightest things in the room.
If you go spot metering, meter off of faces. They are close enough
to 18% grey so the meter is about right.
Raise the ISO higher than you think is reasonable. :) Either the
camera's ISO is great (eg K-5, K-x etc.) or you can use Lightroom or
a noise-reduction plugin, or simply go black and white and call the
grain art.
Take the fastest lens(es) you've got. Learn to like (or at least get
along with) their field of view.
If the action is too fast for manual focusing, pre-focus on a point
and snap when the action gets to that point. Be prepared to have a
very small keeper rate.
-bmw
--
PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List
[email protected]
http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow
the directions.
