One Hour with a M8

[rickp13]

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thanks to laki and ken - confusion over!

 

nick - if you're keeping some sharp leica glass, you're obviously not going too far away from the forum mainstream. i predict (drum roll) you'll be back in full strength very soon. leica has already predicted a slight upswing in future quarterly results to reflect this.

 

see u soon!

 

rick

[steamboat]

Nick - looks like you had a fine time with your M8. Thanks for your feedback and thanks for posting your photographs. You are making good use of your new camera. Good shooting out there!

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[Holmz]

Hi Holmz,

 

Your’s is a very nice picture, and with a square crop I like it better (I started with a Rollei TLR many years ago, and crop accordingly a lot of my pictures). Besides that, I adjusted in Levels the overall green cast seen on my monitor, which affected particularly the girl’s fair hair. My wife is also a true blonde and I live with the problem on a daily basis...

 

Max

 

Yeah I like the square crop...

 

Adjusted the tint and raise the color temp from 2900 to 3100.

But how does one get this right?

Maybe I should shoot a white card, but there was moonlight, incandescent and neons all in the area ???

[Max Alfy]

To adjust the colors, I used Levels in PS. The procedure is described in many books, and boils down to the following:

 

The Levels tool has 3 pipettes, from left to right: black, grey midtones, whites.

 

The idea is to find appropriate sampling points in the picture. Also, in PS, make sure that the sampling pipette size is adjusted to 3x3 px.

 

The correct sampling sequence is: Whites, Blacks, and finally Gray midtones.

 

White & Black are useful to extend the dynamic range of the picture, giving it true whites and blacks. The Gray midtone pipette is the primary tool for a correct color rendition. And the monitor should be calibrated!

 

The sampling points I used in your picture:

 

White pipette: the girl’s blouse near her chin.

Black pipette: the bottom of the bottle in her right hand.

Gray pipette (the most important): I sampled several points on the boy’s cap, until I reached a color which gave the girl a nice honey blond hair.

 

I also pulled the middle Input level slider a little to the left in order to bring-up the light level.

 

In other words, there is no need to adjust the color temp. With the frequent mix of tungsten and fluorescent lights, it most often does not give good results per se since it works only on the tungsten component. The green cast is most probably the result of a fluorescent light somewhere in the room.

 

When I process DNG files (in PO 4.5), I don’t even look at the color temp figure, but immediately sample around the picture to find a satisfactory gray point.

 

Max

[Holmz]

To adjust the colors, I used Levels in PS. The procedure is described in many books, and boils down to the following:

...

Max

 

I am new into digital - so this is helping me a lot.

I am using the Capture1 and I see the three pipettes.

 

Which book (of your aforementioned many books) would you recommend that I start with?

[Max Alfy]

My bedside book is “Photoshop Artistry for Photographers Using Photoshop CS2 and Beyond” by Barry Haynes (http://www.barryhaynes.com).

 

You’ll find it at Amazon for a reasonable price. It is up to date with CS2, but for all the basics of creating a master image it is unequaled in my opinion. Rather than extensively covering all the PS features, it is based on concrete examples covering all the situations the average photographer is confronted to. It is based on a teaching program Barry Haynes conducts.

[james_h]

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Holmz,

 

You could try Photoshop User TV where you can watch tutorials on how to use PS.

Scott Kelby has also written a few books on PS for photographers.

You can download the tutorials as podcasts too.

 

Regards

James