The colour of Trees

Please can you give me some feed back on this picture as it was taken last weekend and the colours just seam so unreal to me. My Camera settings where Exposure Time = 1/45", F Number = F13, Exposure Program = Aperture priority, ISO Speed Ratings = 800.

many thanks In advance

Jackruss

-- JackRuss - 04 Nov 2008

05 Nov 2008 09:43:08 PaulFranklin:

George

Thanks for testing the posting.

More later

Paul

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05 Nov 2008 12:55:36 GlynnGrylls:

Firstly Jack I do like your picture, the colours are very striking and work well together. There really has been a bit of trend lately to slightly over saturate colours in pics, which can be taken too far at times as it dosn't look natural. I assume, though, that you've not made any colour adjustments and find it still looks a bit 'over the top'. I find an image saved as a jpg in camera will often be a little too brightly coloured and too contrasty, and difficult to correct in Photoshop, but if you save the image as a RAW file there is more scope to make the colour just as you want it. Having said that, I am quite happy with the colours in the red / orange / yellow leaves, (after all that's what the pic is about) but find the grass and other greens looks a little to vivid, and suggest toning them down might help to give a more natural look to the whole image. I find that greens are the most difficult colour to get right, and very often look too vivid on unadjusted pics, there's nothing you can do about that if you are saving jpegs, but you can adjust the greens alone in Photoshop without affecting the other colours.

In Photoshop just go to Image > Adjustments > Selective Colour, then select 'Greens' at the top, and adjust the sliders. Probably a little more magenta and black and a little less Cyan and Yellow will help. May take a little trial and eror to get it right.

A couple of other thoughts: I guess conditions were a little dull when the pic was taken as the exposure was 1/45 sec and the ISO 800. I would have tended to open the aperture up to about f5.6, and put the film speed down to about ISO 200. This would give less grain on the pic and enable you to use the smaller depth of field to ensure the background went out of focus. I also find the bright patches of sky in the top a little distracting. The delight of your picture is the bright orange leaves in contrast with the red ones on the other tree, and to emphasise this it might have worked better to go in closer and eliminate all other background colour and shapes, concentrating on one branch of the foreground tree against the (out of focus?) red background.

Hope that helps. Glynn

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05 Nov 2008 13:31:24 JackRuss:

Thank you Glynn your comments are taken on board The colour saturation has not been altered and is as shot. That is what made me look at it as something did not look right ? I opened up to F13 as in the view of getting most of both trees in focus rather than having part not in focus. Are well next year when the leaves are the same colour I might have to try this again, I do have a raw file to play with and I will try and bring the green down on the grass as you suggested and have a play as it where.

thanks again

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