Upon further inspection I found that many of my pictures were doing this to varying degrees. Like this one (the color distortion is mainly in my forehead):
How can I fix this problem? Do I need to shoot in Raw or a different setting? Is it my monitor? I'm stumped, so any help would be great.
EDIT:
If I turn off the high saturation in camera and pump it back up in computer then it seems to rectify the situation. But this seems like it would be a horrible chore to do to every picture that I take in the future. Tips?
8 comments:
Auto white balance (WB) can be your friend and enemy. Read up on WB a little here. With Auto WB (AWB). With AWB on, before every shot your camera takes an average of sensor readings to figure out what "temperature" to use when creating the final image. When shooting JPG this temperature is set into stone; with RAW you can go back and adjust it in post-processing.
The candlelit shot needs a very low temperature to make it look right (1000K to 2000K, K stands for kelvin). Problem is AWB usually has a certain range it won't go out of, say 3000K to 6000K. The candlelit shot looks orange because the white balance was stuck at a "cooler" setting with a very "warm" source. With a proper WB, candles look more like this. On your self-portrait the AWB might have been fooled if there wasn't anything white or grey in frame. Retake
So what to do? Use the WB presets or set a custom WB. You'll have a bunch of presets you can switch between (tungsten, fluorescent, flash, cloudy, etc...) These will get you close and you might be able to fine tune each one warmer or cooler depending on your preference. My D70 has trouble with incandescent bulbs on AWB so I'll use the "lightbulb" preset to get close.
Take some test shots with varying white balance settings and see how it effects the image. I went through the same things you are, I even tried shooting RAW and going through that mess and finally figured out it isn't worth it. My philosophy is to just get it right when making the exposure. Pay attention to your shutter, aperture, exposure, WB and composition while shooting and tweak in Photoshop if you need to.
This might inspire me to start a blog series on more advanced digital photography topics.
Just saw your edit. Turning down the high saturation would help, but WB is still the main culprit. With the wrong WB, colors get shifted with an unnatural cast and then saturating those colors just makes the problem worse. What S/A/ISO (shutter, aperture, ISO) was the candlelit shot taken at? It looks blurry and even a little overexposed which would make things worse.
Immediately after posting this I began to run experiments to see what it could be. The first test i did was a white balance test. I took a picture of Liam under every single white balance setting and I discovered that as long as the saturation was pumped, my monitor was displaying distorted colors. I then did a test where I took a picture using every different picture style. (In canon jargon a picture style is just a different combination of settings like sharpness and saturation.) This is how I came upon the conclusion that it was excess saturation that was overkilling the pictures. On the neutral and faithful picture styles (the ones with no change in saturation) there was no computer color bleeding.
As for the first picture I posted, I just picked the worse case of the color malfunctions. I did manage to get a couple decent one's that cleaned up decently after I dropped the contrast. I'll post some on photobucket and then post the link once I do.
My main concern is the inconsistency in the pictures. Not one picture ever looked bright red on the camera's LCD but I have at least 10 pictures on my computer that came out as bright red facial blobs that don't clean up at all.
And as for auto white balance - I hate it, at least on my camera. In most cases the pictures come out too orange and in some cases I get a purple tint on everything. Either way is no good.
And if you were to start a photo blog I would read it everyday.
Also stay away from the different scene settings. Each one will change too many settings and it'll be tough to get consistent results. I use "P" as my auto mode, "A" when I need to control depth of field, "S" ("Tv" the 40D) when shooting something moving and "M" for controlled "studio" shots. "A-DEP" might be useful for taking group shots. You've also got custom modes, C1 C2 C3, you can configure, I envy you.
Try Ken Rockwell's suggestions and leave contrast alone and bump color to 2 or 3.
Omigosh my brothers are nerds. And for that I am proud.
I know the quick self portrait was taken in aperture priority mode and i think that i took the candlelit shots under full manual.
I am really excited to start using those three custom settings and finding what works best in each one.
And as for Ken Rockwell.. Nathan told me to check him out a long time ago and since then I have read almost every one of his articles and check his page daily for new updates.
Thanks for the tips Andrew, I'll just keep fiddling until I get it right.
Yea.
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