What happened to my Browns?

[PhilDellPhoto]

Hi,
My name is Phil, I'm new to the forum. I poured over the internet trying to find out the answer to a question I've had that keeps popping up in my photography. Browns. Good, rich, natural browns. Post production (I use both PS and LR fairly proficiently) seems to muddy them down, or make them less interesting. I've failed to see a good replication of deep browns in my colors, not consistently anyway.

I personally believe brown is a strange hue and for digital purposes it seems too close to black and dark gray. But maybe I'm just crazy. Does anyone else have this problem, or does anyone have a solution via lighting, etc? Please don't answer with auto adjust or color correction, I know several ways of adjusting the WB both in camera and in post. My goal is to both replicate and amplify the richness of deep brown tones.

I shoot with a Canon XSI with a canon 1.4 and a tamron 2.8 zoom.

Thanks!

[OsmosisStudios]

The reason for this is simple: you're shooting digital.

It's hard to get a nice rich brown. Even on a computer monitor, its nigh-on-impossible. It's the same with Purples and Blues as well as certain shades of green. The colour spaces used for screens (RGB) just doesnt allow them.

Photo.net has a good diagram, produced here:



The solid line shows the colours you can get from the 16 million using the RGB space (dotted is CMYK, used for printing). Your lovely browns are off to the right of the triangle where the red and orange meet. Purples are down below the triangle, true blues are as well, and greens are all off the top. As you can see, the CMYK space is even smaller, meaning anything you print will have even less variation! Keep in mind, as well, that the colours show here are at 100% luminosity, so brown would be a darker orange.

This is just an advent of digital: we learn to live with it.

[wulf]

I can't say that I have particularly noticed a problem and have a number of shots where I am pleased with the dark, rich browns achieved, such as this recent one:



That is much richer than the original shot (below) but only had minimal processing - setting a grey point by eye using the levels tool, some fiddling with curves and then a crop, resize and sharpen.



Wulf