photo colour temperature

[dindsy]

Hopefully my photos are attached.

So dragging the camera out I decided to play with depth of field just to get the process right with a view to taking some bird shots.

To my surprise I ended up with these two very different looking photos of the tree branch. The photos were taken from exactly the same spot and right after each other. So same time of day. The only difference was that I squatted down for the b version to reduce the amount of fence in the shot. I varied the aperture settings and took a number of shots and couldn't end up with the same brown colours of the "a" version.

At home using the raw images in photoshop I could drag the temperature slider up and easily create the same colours as in 'a".

There was a lot of background foliage and it's not like I suddenly shooting into a bright sky. Can someone explain why this is happening. is there something I can do taking the photo to get the effect I wanted which was the darker wood colour. It seemed to me that "a" was a truer representation of what I was seeing with my eye.

cheers

[Mark L]

Your using auto WB in camera. Auto will present things differently. Maybe set your cameras WB to daylight, although using raw means you can change it later.
A bigger concern here is the lack of detail due to f/2.8 maybe?

[arthurking83]

Like Mark said, AWB will do that for 'ya, but I prefer to set WB in post processing anyhow, so whatever the camera thinks is needed, has always been irrelevant for me.

One way you can get all images looking the same, is not with Photoshop(as Photoshop doesn't work with raw images anyhow), but with ACR which works on the raw file to convert it into a file type that Photoshop can work with.
(alternatively if you use Lightroom, it will work in a similar fashion.

You click both images icons so that they are both active, and it doesn't matter which one you can 'operate on' but with both of them active you can set the WB temp to a specific value(ie. in this case try anywhere from cloudy to shade).
Or you can use the WB dropper tool to set the grey point. If you do this with the one image still with the two images highlighted the other image is getting it's WB value from the other image.
if you do this dropper method, a good start point for a WB reference point would be the fence rail area.

My guess is that a was set to a WB value more likely to be cloudy-shade(6000K-8000K), whereas b was probably more like daylight(5000K) or lower.

Also, Mark made the comment that the image seems to lack some detail, which seems true for A, but b looks fine.


Hope that makes sense

[ameerat42]

Dindsy. "Color/our Temperature" is the correct term. Changed title to suit.
Am.

[dindsy]

Thanks for the feedback. I will look into WB settings.
I was going to query the lack of detail comments but comparing a and b I can see what you mean. the answer is simple enough. I was very close and right at the limit of minimum focal distance so it's just not focused properly I suspect.

Good tips on setting the WB. it does make sense. But I managed to open and adjust the Raw image in Photoshop CC. I don't know if the CC makes it different from just photoshop. Does it?

[arthurking83]

.... But I managed to open and adjust the Raw image in Photoshop CC. I don't know if the CC makes it different from just photoshop. Does it?

Sorry, I don't any adobe software, did use Lr a little, and had Ps for a bit, but uninstalled it due to zero use and bloating of PC resources .. so my comments re Ps were 'from memory'.

No idea what Ps CC entails. But from what I remember of Ps, it can't directly open any camera raw files, maybe DNG but never tried.
So to get raw images into Ps, you had to use either Adobe Bridge(yuklo!) or ACR as a preliminary step to pre edit the raw file, by setting the usual round of raw file edits .. like WB, exposure, and so forth.
You saved those edits to those raw files, then it would automagically then send the image to Ps so you can do the tricky stuff.

[dindsy]

you are correct in that PS used to be a pain and I remember having to use the Nikon App (which was pretty awful) to convert the NEF file into something that PS could open. I have the new pay per year subscriber version now and it can open the files directly.

so it seems they have caught up.