picture help, oversaturation

[Anonymous]

How do you photo "pros" deal with oversaturation in a picture? I specifically mean the top of the coral being almost completely bleached out, and the bottom underside being overly dark. Is it all post-photoediting? Someway of taking the pictures I'm missing? What?

I mean sure it's a nice indication to seeing what part of the corals is getting the most light, but I still want to have some sort of photo-diary of their progress

For instance here's an acropora nana frag I recently got. I did use the auto-level tool in photoshop to bring the picture closer to what I can see (ie phase out the blue).

Here's the unedited picture incase there's some photo-dohickying some of you may want to try, full pic too not just the cropped piece.
http://img91.imageshack.us/img91/434/nana2ue3wl.jpg a little large so I'm just leaving the link.

 

[highwayman]

For me it's a matter of lighting and the angle the pic is being taken...

 

[clippo]

sps are a problem under flash or MH - best shot under tubes with no flash IME. Otherwise you'd need to do it in PP using layer masks. Generally, the human eye is said to be more forgiving of loss of shadow detail, so if you are just going to do it woth a single shot, try to expose to avoid the growth tips being 'hot'.

 

[The_Big_Fish]

Turn your exposure setting down, or set you shutter speed ( ISO) to a HIGHER speed, turnther flash strength down. Just play around with those settings
As for actual over saturation of color. I use paint shop pro.
All you do is chose effects, saturation enhancment, then click less colorful, chose the strength, and skin tones present or not.
If that dosent help you can use the contrast option on your camera or in paint shop pro.

 

[clippo]

shutter speed ( ISO)

shutter speed and ISO are different actually - setting your shutter speed higher would have the effect of reducing exposure, but raising ISO would increase it. FWIW, I am not sure that colour oversaturation is the real problem here - its the exposure of the piece as a whole - how to get the detail on the growth tips while retaining the shadow detail. I would use layer masks in Photoshop personally.

 

[The_Big_Fish]

I know, I dont know why I did that.
ment to make it look as if those were all options to play around with.
No exuse for the higher ISO setting though 8O Lack of sleep? Crack? LOL!!
Try no flash,and play with your enviorment settings, or a higher shutter speed. Try a lower flash level,or lower your exposure level and flash level. play with the saturation effect option in your camera as well.
It just take some practice and playing around with your camera settings, different angles ect. ect. ...

 

[Anonymous]

well my camera doesn't have a manual shutter speed, I have in the past tried to trick it by "half-clicking" on a spot really bright at a similar distance to get a higher shutter speed then moving to the coral but that just leaves a much too dark photo. I don't have any tubes over my sps, otherwise I'd try that, but thanks for the advice.

 

[Anonymous]

If your camera has the option, shoot in RAW mode...it'll give you the most flexibility to correct exposure issues. Also, looking at your full version, you're cropping WAY in on that image...you're going to experience significant loss of quality.

Here's a quick&dirty edit I did in photoshop CS2 based off of your full-size original. There's just a lot of noise that's hard to clear up when it gets cropped in so close.

 

[Anonymous]

I don't understand how cropping does anything. It's not like a blew up the picture size, I just took the original picture and erased everything I didn't want.