While you are out buying coloured sheets, pick up a spray bottle of the sort gardeners use. Great for adding water drops to flower/plant macros

K.

I think you're right. The grainy nature of the rock face would probably cope with a little bit of noise. I wonder what a BW conversion would look like?

K.

Oh well, I tried

K.

Welcome to the forum. Good luck with your hunt.

K.

Welcome to the fora and have fun, we all do

K.

If the K-m has interchangeable focus screens like the K10 and K20 you can easily remove the screen with the correct pair of screen-removing tweezers as seen in this photograph.. There is also a move on youtube showing you how to do it. You can then puff/hoover your screen and the bottom of the prism. Be careful though, the screen will scratch almost as soon as look at it.

Using 50 year old cameras has taught me to just live with it. As long as the final image is OK, I leave well alone.

K.

Use something like the magnetic lasoo tool to very carefully select the branch and droplets (this might take several goes and try your patience). Then reverse the selection so that everything except the branch is selected, then apply something like the Gaussian blur filter.

Doable, but a RPITA

K.

Although the scene looks nice, the image does have an odd quality to it which I cannot quite put a finger on, but looks to me like a processing issue, or something to do with the reduction or how it is posted. The badly-printed postcard analogy seems apt. I don't know what happened, but something isn't quite right which is detracting from the shot. Perhaps starting the PP from the original file might solve the problem?

Best wishes, Kris.

Do you mean five? Yes, I guess the range would have been too much unless you used a little bit of fill-in flash and that would be difficult to get looking natural. One might compromise and allow some burning out of the highlights then bringing up the foreground in PP. Not sure how many times that young lady would be prepared to scamper up and down the stairs though while one tried to get it technically correct. As it is, despite its technical imperfections, I rather like it

My comment was intended to be more general, i.e., use the histogram to avoid burnt out highlights (and at least you can quickly see when the dynamic range is too large for the sensor).

Best wishes, K.

The chances are that if you have got the white balance correct in the camera it will probably print OK. If your monitor is giving you dodgy colours and you "correct" the colour on screen, it will then print out incorrectly.

It isn't really that different to film. You would make sure you had the right film for the lights you were using. If the image ended up with a colour cast you didn't like you would correct it by filtration during the printing stage. Different film/paper/filtration combinations would give different results so you would learn which you prefered. To someone used to digital this all seems like obscure alchemy whereas to you it is bread and butter stuff, and the reverse situation is true as well.

The main issue is that provided you are using much the same set-up (same printer, same monitor, setting white balance manually) you only have to crack the problem once. Once you have got a working set-up that you are happy with, job done!

Some people never calibrate their monitors, John for one. They have been lucky enough to have a monitor which is close to "true". If you are unlucky and have a monitor which is not giving true colours and/or contrast you need to adjust it. The easiest (if not the cheapest) way is to use something like a Spyder. Install the software that comes with the gizmo, plug it in, run the software and follow the on-screen instructions. Once a week or so the software will ask you if you want to check the calibration.

I agree all the literature can be over-whelming at first (my head reels when people start discussing colour spaces and printer profiles) but it really is something you just do once. Well, until you buy a new printer or a new monitor so it is worth taking notes!

Not sure this helps that much.

Best wishes, and good luck, Kris.