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It started innocently enough. I went out to get the newspaper. As I walked back to the house, I noticed some fresh blossoms on one of our azaleas. That bush always blooms early. This year it started before the last freeze and the early blooms were frozen and shriveled up. Now some fresh color was showing. A few raindrops stuck to the petals, and they looked pretty in the morning sun. I pulled out my phone and took a couple of photos.
Back in the house I loaded my images into ON1 Photo RAW 2022. Sure enough, it showed the red channel smashing up against the right side indicating serious overexpose. Not uncommon, red, pink, yellow flowers quite often yield overexposure.
I decided to just skip over these photos, but it bothered me. Later on, I decided to use the “big camera” to take some photos at various compensation levels to demonstrate this frequent problem.
Looking at the information on the camera showed the results: With normal exposure the blossom was overexposed in the red channel, just as expected. One stop underexposure showed a full range of data within the histogram window.
Once loaded into the image editor the results were pretty much the same. I also loaded the raw image file into other post-processing apps.
Then the fun began
The results were different in each editor. See my lament over in This ‘n That. What was astonishing and perplexing was that PaintShop Pro found just a tiny bit of overexposure, and a nice “little hill” of red data on the high end.
A perfectly usable image. How PSP translated the Nikon NEF file in a very useful manner, I don’t know. That may become a topic for a future investigation.
The processed image is not a masterful flower photograph, so you won’t find it in my gallery blog. Here it is:
Notice how the petals seem cleaner and not “blown out” like they are in the screen capture above – not the same photo, but the other photo editors showed the photo similarly deteriorated.
Since I spent a good deal of time on this photo, I will add it to CMMC, Cee’s Midweek Madness Challenge – Close Up or Macro. Might as well go ahead and add it to her FOTD – Flower of the Day Challenge as well. Maybe a more experienced flower photographer can shed some light on this quandary.
.:. © 2022 Ludwig Keck
Gosh, this impressive run-down is way above my pay-grade! Great photos anyway.
Haha, Margaret. Sometimes when we get bitten by a technical problem, we have no choice but to learn a little more. I trying to do that learning now. Hopefully I can share what is helpful and skip the esoteric.
Sounds like a plan!
That’s a brilliant tip. Red and yellow flowers are so common, yet so hard to take
My azaleas are starting to bud. So I’m not too far behind you. 😀
Love the creativity in these pictures. Amazing art
Thank you, Mark