• Welcome to BirdForum, the internet's largest birding community with thousands of members from all over the world. The forums are dedicated to wild birds, birding, binoculars and equipment and all that goes with it.

    Please register for an account to take part in the discussions in the forum, post your pictures in the gallery and more.
ZEISS DTI thermal imaging cameras. For more discoveries at night, and during the day.

Leaf lost it's colour (1 Viewer)

charly streets

Charlie Streets
This shot was taken with a coolpix 4500 using the cool light ring flash.As you can see the Sycamore leaf has lost much of greenness.I was wondering if instead of simply darkening the leaf there was a way of reintroducing the original colour to negate the effects of the flash.As a relative newcomer to digital photography any comments are very welcome.
 

Attachments

  • qqq.jpg
    qqq.jpg
    273.9 KB · Views: 233
It can be done, but you'd need some advanced editing tools. You don't mention which image editing software you have available. So I'll give a few suggestions using examples form PaintShopPro's tools that I'm familiar with.

You have several routes you can take.

I would first try using a manual color correction tool. In PSP, this tool allows you to select an area (in your example, one of the blown-out green patches), then select a desired-color swatch (or use a color picker to select a color already present in the photo). It tries to match that hues in the selected area to the new color/intensity without overly affecting the rest of the colors in the image.

If you don't have that, you might have some luck with a standard color-replacer brush. Again, setting a tolerance for it to match values that would cover most of the hue/intensity range of the light areas that you are trying to replace. In PSP this tool acts as a brush and you can sweep over the areas, only affecting the color that you are trying to match and replace.

Another option would be to use a mask, selecting the light-greens, with a 1 or 2 pixel feathered border. Then you could flood-fill the light areas with a new color, or even a new texture/pattern that you've copied into your color swatches right from the original photo.

You might also try using a "curves" adjustment tool, to lower the overall contrast of the image, while also dragging down the highlight values towards the mid-tones. Don't be afraid to darken the whole image some, it's the only way to get some more intense colors in it (bright highlights can't convey much color, as you've noticed). Then apply more saturation to the whole flatter and darker image. Then readjust again with the curves adjustment to give it more contrast again (or use a standard contrast enhancement tool). I've had some success with this method in the past.

I've had to replace blown-out yellows in butterfly-wing patterns in the past, where they appear nearly white. These are some of the methods that I've used.
 
Thanks for that Keoeeit, plenty to think about there. I had a quick go on Adobe elements with the eye dropper to select a colour, then the paintbrush tool at about 15% opacity and manually filled in affected areas to tone down the harsh brightness and add a bit of colour- a process a hadn't used before.Then with the enhance-levels selection and the replace colour option I removed some of the overwhelming greeness of the picture which to me makes the leaf a little less overpowering. It's difficult to know when to stop!
Iv'e uploaded my improved version which I think is a definite improvement-thanks again. :clap:
 

Attachments

  • 1.jpg
    1.jpg
    62.6 KB · Views: 196
Yes, much better. And as you've seen (along with the methods I mentioned) there's many ways to skin the cat (apologies to the cat lovers :).

I would still tweak the overall contrast some. I generally use the curves adjustment tool for that, as it can also fine-tune your saturation at the same time (when you get used to how it works). I think you undersaturated it just a tad, probably from fear of going to high again.

But yes, MUCH better!

Amazing what we can do compared to the old dark-room days, eh?
 
Warning! This thread is more than 19 years ago old.
It's likely that no further discussion is required, in which case we recommend starting a new thread. If however you feel your response is required you can still do so.

Users who are viewing this thread

Back
Top