How to fix colors (1 Viewer)

Attached are two Hyacinth Macaw photos, both digiscoped. One shows the true colors against a green background. The second against a blue background makes the birds look almost black. How can I fix the one that looks black, so that it shows truer colors?

If there is a better forum to ask this question, please let me know.

Thanks.

Not sure this is to your liking but I played with the levels and color saturation.

You've started a big question here. I'm not entirely sure what you're asking exactly, when it comes to the two pictures, so I apologize in advance if some of my answer strikes you as irrelevant.

I think there are two things involved in your photo:

The first is that whenever you have an object against a bright background (and possible with the light behind them) then the camera, left to its own devices, will always underexpose your subject. This is because it is trying to expose correctly for the 'average' of the image, whereas you would like to expose correctly for the (dark to the camera) foreground object. This is the problem that exposure compensation is trying to solve. Ideally one accounts for that when taking the picture, but it can be hard to guess what is right (and in the excitement of a nice observation it's easy to forget as well). In post-production you can still make adjustments (increase exposure, or maybe just lift the shadows would be how one did this in Lightroom, but any kind of post-processing software will allow you to do this sort of thing.

The question of the perceived colour is much more subtle. Light has a colour, and this colour has an affect on how we perceive other colours. The human brain is very good at accounting for the colour of the ambient light, and computing how the information that comes into the eye should be perceived. For example, close to sunrise/sunset the light is more red, and everything looks more reddish. In your first picture you have shade, which tends to have a bluer light (and light reflecting from the foliage might make the light hitting the parrots also greener).

This is what the white balance of your camera is for: It's trying to record what the light conditions were so that the information from the sensors can be rendered appropriately. Letting the camera set the white balance automatically works a lot of the time, but not always. If you think the second picture does not appropriately record the colour of the macaws, you can play with the white balance in your post-processing software.

Having just returned from the Pantanal myself I do think it's a good likeness of what one sees in early morning light, but if it doesn't match what you remember then do try changing the white balance.

(There's a lot more to colour perception - different monitors will also render colours in different ways, but that's a whole separate chapter.)

Andrea

Thanks. I tried playing with the white balance in Photoshop but it seemed that getting the colors closer to reality needed adjustment in many other settings. My hope was to get the blue to be a closer match to the blue in the first photo. But as you point out, the reality is that the bird would probably not look like this in life under these harsh light conditions. And that leads to a larger question of whether it is worth it to try to emulate soft light conditions in a photo shot under harsh light.

Particularly challenging is bringing out the blue of the bird without severely altering the blue of the sky.

I do not know lightroom as I use ACDSee. In there, I have a lightning tool that essentially allows me to lighten the darker parts of a photo without affecting the paler parts. Fill light is a more crude version of the same functionality. That I think could do most of the job of separating birds from sky when making adjustments, without having to resort to layer masks and other advanced tricks.

I would probably not go as far as you did in the last image you uploaded, notice that for example the eye-ring looks washed out when compared with your image one (the one you say looks about right).

Niels

Looks like a White Balance Issue to me.
I assume that in both images the WB was set by the camera. Thus it may be off in both images and you just assume that #1 is the way the colors should look like.
Do you work from RAW or jpg files? Correction of WB in post is much more successful from RAW than it will be from jpg. Note that you don't really need a white spot in the image to correct WB, gray works just as well.
Using one of the branches in your 2nd image as WB target got the result pretty close to the color of the bird in the first image, even with just the jpg to work with and no other adjustments.
To maintain the blue of the sky you could work in PS using layers with two different WB settings, or mask the area where WB should be adjusted.