Unreal tulips

[ihateliver]

Hi,
I took this photo recently and was really disappointed to find that the red colour of the tulips is so vivid it makes them look unreal - as if they've been "blobbed" on as an afterthought, almost detached from the stems.
The only thing I know I did wrong was to leave the picture style on "Landscape" which does enhance colours a little - but this seems really extreme ?
It was an overcast but reasonably bright day. There has been no PP.
I did a bracketed exposure and the -0.33 looks slightly better but still crap !
Any ideas where I went wrong, please ?



Canon EOS 450D with kit lens
ISO: 200
Exposure: 1/30 sec
Aperture: 11.0
Focal Length: 27mm
Flash Used: No

[sk66]

That's pretty bad...
I note that everything except the tulips seems ok. I also note that there is no color space information in the image....is it Srgb?
Could also be in camera exposure settings...was it captured as a Jpeg?

[RichardTaylor]

It's the same for reds in my pics.
I usually desaturate them when PPing and also I dont use the landscape preset, prefering to use camera faithful when processing pics like this (from the RAW files) .

[ihateliver]

Hi Sky66 - the colour space is Adobe RGB.
Yes, it was captured as a Jpeg - is that so bad ? I thought RAW was only needed if you intended to do lots of work on it with several re-saves ?
(You've probably guessed I'm still quite new at this stuff).

Thanks Richard, for the reassuring comment that it is perhaps not just me :-)
I guess I'll have to find some more red tulips and experiment with some different settings...

[thatBilly]

Originally Posted by ihateliver

Hi Sky66 - the colour space is Adobe RGB.
Yes, it was captured as a Jpeg - is that so bad ? I thought RAW was only needed if you intended to do lots of work on it with several re-saves ?

RAW is a record of what the camera sees, JPEG is an adaptation which loses a significant amount of data in terms of colour depth then further losses through compression. In this case, your camera made a decision to boost all that red to the detriment of the photo.

I'm a newbie too but I've been so keen to get RAW images because I know that in camera processing can be waaay off.

[Bruce A]

Does your camera have film type settings such as standard, vivid etc. If so you may want to set it to standard.

[sk66]

Originally Posted by ihateliver

Hi Sky66 - the colour space is Adobe RGB.
Yes, it was captured as a Jpeg - is that so bad ? I thought RAW was only needed if you intended to do lots of work on it with several re-saves ?
(You've probably guessed I'm still quite new at this stuff).

Thanks Richard, for the reassuring comment that it is perhaps not just me :-)
I guess I'll have to find some more red tulips and experiment with some different settings...

You need your pictures to be Srgb (not adobe) with the color space embedded in the image for web display...should not be a problem viewing adobe RGB within an editing program on your computer (but most browsers won't handle it well)

The main reason I questioned the Jpeg capture is that when capturing Jpegs instead of Raw files the camera will apply saturation/contrast/sharpness etc settings as it's programmed to do..It doesn't do this with RAW files. You could have some settings set to "vivid" or similar....

[ihateliver]

Thanks for all the comments.
Yesterday, I found some more red tulips - nothing as dramatic as the full bed of them that came out unreal - but enough to take a few shots with different settings.
I couldn't completely replicate the unreal look, but in my view the setting that had the biggest effect on the reproduction of the red colour was colour space. Adobe RGB definitely struggles with those reds. After that, the choice of picture style (Landscape vs Standard vs Neutral) also has an effect - but this is their purpose after all ?
I also set the camera to record in both RAW and jpeg, but to me this made no difference at all.

Still, all useful stuff - thanks again (I'll be sticking to SRGB colour in future !)