Testing Testing 123

I've been suffering from the colour blues lately, or more precisely the colour yellows, as many shots have had too strong yellows when seen on others monitors. 'Bizarre' and 'way off' have been some of the descriptions posted .

I have now made adjustments to my monitor settings- I found that the grey balance was really quite cool in tone which I was not aware of, so I've fixed that.

I have taken 3 recent images and started from scratch with the RAW again - using the exact same software, techniques & colour spaces, I have re-edited them and I post them here next to the original 'too yellow' versions. I see the colours on these new ones as good with my new monitor settings, so I just need to get the feedback that they are reproducing correctly on everyone elses monitors. I'd be very grateful if you could provide that feedback and comments.

Many thanks, Nigel



A. ORIGINAL VERSION






A. NEW VERSION






B. ORIGINAL VERSION





B. NEW VERSION






C. ORIGINAL VERSION






C. NEW VERSION





Thanks for your time in helping with this

Hi Nigel, thanks for sticking your head above the parapet again!

The second versions are certainly different, but I don't think you've sorted it out yet. There is a bit less yellow, but to me the colours in the second versions now look very 'washed out'.

Hope you don't mind, I've just downloaded the second image and made a single colour adjustment, to me this looks better:




Regards
David

Here's another one with a bit more of the yellow reduced:

I agree with David, Nigel. The images still look yellow, but now de-saturated. For comparison, this is your A. ORIGINAL VERSION after applying the white balance tool in PSP X4, using the white paint on the wooden window frames as the reference point:




How does it look on your monitor - and others?

Philip

Not quite there yet, but getting better.

Part of the problem is areas of grass and foliage that are brightly lit, often where also parts of the image are in shadow. The result from a digital sensor is a very unnatural colour in the brighter parts due to over exposure. For whatever reason, digital sensors don't like over exposed green.

The rest of it is down to processing and I'd still like to know how you'd get on with a JPEG capture. You could do RAW+JPEG and use the JPEG as a guide perhaps?

I'm curious as to your "point of reference" when trying the white balance. The turret of the building looks ever-so-slightly bluish. I'd opt for using the lower-left window (middle of the image in pic 1) as the point of reference, and see if that offers a slightly more subtle end-result. The table in the forefront looks a little too blue/grey to be "natural", and the grass still has a distinct yellow tinge to it.

Photo 2 perhaps needs an increase in the red-channel, as the brickwork is more "orangey" than brick-red.

Pic 3, I'd opt for the door for the white-balance, or the window at mid-height to the right of the shot, next to the trees.

Just a thought Nigel but is it possible that as these images were taken during our recent spell of hot dry weather, that maybe the grass had a yellow tinge to it anyway? Quite normal for short dry grass not to be green.
Maybe you need to set your monitor to a known colour source rather than assuming green is a particular green or even the white window frames are white !! If you see what I mean.

All the best......jim.

Jim, you're right of course - the grass was very dry and I believe the tone I've got in my new versions is close to what it looked like. I can see now that the earlier versions were wrong, I think now because of the monitor settings, so I am glad to see that this has improved.

Thanks to everyone for the helpful advice above - I'm mainly concerned that I am achieving a more realistic and life-like depiction of the greens and yellows, and this is obviously not a fixed value - ot varies between locations, time of day and season, and overall brightness. I'm less concerned with the finer white balance tuning, which to a degree must be a personal preference.

In Mr B's version above I can now detect a magenta twinge, which is not natural, and in David's versions of the brick wall scene I still find the reds and yellows oversaturated. Its true that my new version looks a bit washed out, and I have deliberately reduced yellow saturation, but thats because I'm so scared now to have too much yellow in anything !

But its all been very good information which I'm sure will help in future. So thanks again to you all for taking the time to look at it.