I think most everyone has thrown some pictures into the gallery at this point. I’m hoping Sean will share the film shots at some point in the future.
Some lovely photographs.
One interesting observation is the difference on colour warmth between Louises bridge picture and mine. Both were taken at roughly the same place and roughly the same time but the difference in colours are clearly visibile.
So, todays question. Why?
OK, we have different cameras (a Canon versus a Nikon) and I posted based on a jpeg whilst Louise used a raw, but surely the colours should still be close?
(I hope you don’t mind me linking directly to your picture Louise!)
Paul,
I cant see any images in the Gallery.
I was going to upload a few that i’d previously taken but nowhere to send them.
Sean
There are a couple of possible explanations on the difference in colour ‘warmth’ between your photo and Louise’s.
Digital cameras these days can have a ‘profile’ loaded onto them that controls how they react to light in certain conditions. For instance, although the camera has an ISO setting, you’re not changing anything related to ISO film ratings really, all you’re doing is altering the profile that tells the CCD how sensitive it should be to incoming light. A higher figure makes it more sensitive to light, but also ‘noisier’ and so less true to the nature of the incoming light. This noisiness at higher ‘ISO’ settings mimics the problems of using real high ISO films – they get grainier the higher the ISO.
But there’s more. The ability to shoot indoors under tungsten lights is also a simple tweak of the digital camera’s profile. (In my day we had to finish that spool of film and put in a special ‘indoor lighting’ roll, otherwise the photos all came out with an orange cast.) So, the profile (which is really just a proprietary algorithm of sorts) can also affect colour tone.
There’s more still. Even if the colour tone processing was identical between the two manufacturers, digital cameras try to tweak the colour balance as well. That is, in an effort to ensure that the photo you take is the one you expect, the camera takes in all the colours used in the photo and average them out a bit. (A large part of the reason for this is that, after a while, your eyes are less affected by a consistent colour cast – if you’re out looking at things under orange lights, after a while you stop noticing the orange cast everything has. Or perhaps you just notice it a little less. This ‘averaging’ of the colour balance is partly the camera trying to compensate for your eyes.)
Needless to say, different cafacturers use different (proprietary) algorithms to manage colour tone and colour balance. So, it’s to be expected that there’d be a difference between your photo and Louise’s.
Erm, also, you might have been shooting with the ‘indoor’ setting switched on. But I would never dare to suggest that.
Geoff
For what it’s worth, I can view the gallery just fine. No idea how to upload to it though.
Suggest Away! I could well have had some sort of setting on in the camera. Your mention of tungsten has sent me into a dizzy spin of raw settings though…
Oh, and to upload photos, you need the username and password. If you want em, drop me an email?
Paul,
I would guess that Geoff is pretty close to the mark, your photo was taken in JPEG so your camera will have attempted to jigger (technical term) with the colours and do it’s best to get them as you seem them. On the other hand because Louise shot in RAW her shot didn’t get the jiggering done to it until it was loaded into her image processing software (Lightroom on this occassion). That is the big strength of RAW, you can control the white balance.
The one thing that would be interesting to know is what would have happened if both of you had shot in RAW and then uploaded the images into the same software. Would there still be a difference?
The other possibility for difference in the images is the settings you used. Lou’s settings were uploaded with the image, any idea what yours were?
Stu
Hi Stuart,
Yup, the settings I used were (1.6secs, f/9, aperture priority, focal length – 28mm, ISO – 100, 24/10/07 18:52)
I also have the raw picture as the camera is set to take both at the same time. I’ll push it into Lightroom and if you tell me what settings you used I’ll try them. I’ll put the raw raw (if you’ll excuse the pun) into the web gallery now.
Paul,
As far as I know, we didn’t do anything to Lou’s photo in lightroom, it is possible that the difference was made when it was exported out of lightroom into a JPEG.
Now that you have it in Lightroom, export it and see if it makes a difference. Darrell and I noticed that sometimes when you go to JPEG it can make the colours slightly cooler, which might explain what happened to Lou’s shot.
Oh, and just to add to the confusion, different camera manufacturers have different ideas of what ‘Raw’ is. It’s also usually proprietary (and licensable), rather than being a cross-manufacturer standard.
That’s why Adobe came out with – the ‘Digital Negative’ standard. It’s another proprietary standard for a raw-equivalent format, but at least it has the potential to be cross-manufacturer.