Blown Bright Colors - Is it Just Me?

PhotosGuy wrote in post #6465284
And I like the first one better.

Me too.

Your edit makes the colors spectacularly dull.

Agreed; you should sell that camera immediately. I'll buy your 5D from you for $1k! I promise to take photos of flowers for you.

Your issue is the light source and the angle at which you're shooting the subject.

Aw crud! I didn't explain my post at all, did I?

The ugly shot IS ugly and spectacularly dull. What I liked was the ability to mess with it; to modify the RAW file to change the color/detail. Shot after a full day at work, rushing to catch that same light, then marginally messing with it before feeding dogs, fixing dinner and all of the other joys of domestic life.

So yes, the shot is awful, I was sharing how excited I was that I'm on track to a solution!

Now to learn more about post-processing RAW files, work flows, and all that other stuff that will result in brain cramps!

Sorry, just going to go on a little rant here. What is it with people and thinking they ahve to do everything in Photoshop or Elements or whatever. People need to learn how to get it right in the camera.

Shoot RAW, get it off auto white balance, use a grey card (white card with 5D) and set a custom white balance. Expose properly, get a hand held light meter if you can, there is a world if difference between actual light and reflective light. put your color setting in standard.

If you do this you will not need to PP pretty much ever. Take the extra 2-5 minutes to get it right in camera and save yourself hours sitting in front of your monitor "fixing" everything.

Right Cranium Imaging wrote in post #6475523
Sorry, just going to go on a little rant here. What is it with people and thinking they ahve to do everything in Photoshop or Elements or whatever. People need to learn how to get it right in the camera.

Shoot RAW, get it off auto white balance, use a grey card (white card with 5D) and set a custom white balance. Expose properly, get a hand held light meter if you can, there is a world if difference between actual light and reflective light. put your color setting in standard.

If you do this you will not need to PP pretty much ever. Take the extra 2-5 minutes to get it right in camera and save yourself hours sitting in front of your monitor "fixing" everything.

You may be reading your 5D manual incorrectly. Yes, it says to use a white card for the Custom White Balance, but on the next page it says that you can get a more accurate CWB using an 18% Gray Card. Every Canon Camera that I have checked has this same caveat in the footnotes. Why, I don't know, but it is consistent across the board.

Confusing, isn't it? I ran a test:
Gray Card…White Paper. What’s best?

Robert_Lay wrote in post #6476470
You may be reading your 5D manual incorrectly. Yes, it says to use a white card for the Custom White Balance, but on the next page it says that you can get a more accurate CWB using an 18% Gray Card. Every Canon Camera that I have checked has this same caveat in the footnotes. Why, I don't know, but it is consistent across the board.

My intuition tells me that a white card (or light gray) would make more sense than the standard gray card for a couple reasons -

• The gray cards that I own or have seen are not the same gray. Some tend to look slightly blue while others have a slightly brown color.
  
• Even with a truly neutral gray card, extrapolating white from something closer to actual white seems more reasonable than extrapolating from something that would fall halfway (in terms of human perception) between black and white.

bill boehme wrote in post #6482053
My intuition tells me that a white card (or light gray) would make more sense than the standard gray card for a couple reasons -

• The gray cards that I own or have seen are not the same gray. Some tend to look slightly blue while others have a slightly brown color.
  
• Even with a truly neutral gray card, extrapolating white from something closer to actual white seems more reasonable than extrapolating from something that would fall halfway (in terms of human perception) between black and white.

However, after saying that, I find that I often adjust white balance to make an image perceptually look right for the context regardless of what the technically neutral white balance might be. Besides, I have found that white balance varies with location in a frame so I don't believe that it can be precisely nailed down as the "right" value.

As far as what the manual is concerned, my theory about this ... based on lots of experience with tech writers, is that once something gets into a tech manual, it becomes boilerplate for all future manuals regardless of its accuracy. Tech writers don't seem to be fazed much by engineering reviews telling them to correct something, especially if the error has tenure.

Dear Bill,

You make good points, and here is my counter-argument.
What you say about gray cards possibly not being neutral is certainly a risk. However, My gray card comes from Kodak, and I trust it to have an appearance that is possibly not neutral, if it is in a light that is not neutral. Aha!

I do not trust a white card because white sits at a pointof inflection - i.e., value 255 in all three channels, nominally. If I illuminate the white card with light that is not pure white, will the non-linearity at white be a problem. Makes my head hurt to think about it, so I vote for something more in the linear region, like 18% gray.

Last but not least, every Canon user's manual that discusses Custom White Balance has this same equivocation - white is good but gray is better.

Normally, I adjust my exposure so that the white card will give a value in the vicinity of 235 to 245 in each channel which leaves some headroom for highlights.

But, I have also considered that another argument in favor of an accurate gray card could be that it might balance colors more precisely in the mid exposure area where we would be the most interested in getting proper skin tones.

My Kodak gray card is the one that looks brown to me -- but then it is rather old so maybe it really is brown. I have a GretagMacBeth card that is divided equally into white, gray, and black. When exposure is set right so that gray is at the mid point of the histogram, I find that I can set the WB with either the white or gray without seeing much difference. I have never done any quantitative measurements, but I tend to prefer using the white if it is not overexposed. I presume that I could do a comparison by using both for WB correction to see what the results would look like across the gray scale on a Color Checker card.

Works for me, too, which is what I suggested in my link in post 22.

I made a test shot on a GretagMacBeth Color Checker card and then using ACR did a series of white balance adjustments using the white and gray patches along the bottom row of the card. There was essentially no difference in white balance from the five patches that I sampled. I suppose that I could have gone to the extreme and sampled the black patch, too. So, I learned two things:

1. My color checker card has good neutral gray patches
   
2. if you have a neutral sample in the image, it doesn't matter much what the luminosity value is.

True, as long as none of the images have blown the whites to 255, 255, 255.