I started out the evening with a few experiments on using the X-right color checker, and my continued analysis on how poorly the Nikon D3s deals with yellow and greens in situations in weak sunlight. You see, after handling this camera for a few tens of thousands of clicks, I know it does not like yellow, and that if the sensor is framed with a lot of yellow then a red color cast turns purples to blues, and yellow also starts towards orange..ugly stuff…. So I had the passport in my bag and decided to take some shots then head into the digital darkroom to learn out to neutralize my color cast of the X-right passport.
Simple enough, there are quite a few You tube how to videos on the xright passport, but I could not get all of my color corrected off the grey patch. What worked for me was the Welcome to OZ, Black, White, Grey (BWG) point action that I picked up from Mr Versace. I think his Photoshop action for BWG point is second to none. What I ended up doing was, I took my passport Xright passport camera image, loaded it into CS5 and then did Mr VV BWG point action, and then tweaked Black for 7 value on each RGB channel, then the white at 245 on each RGB channel and then the grey point at 128 and tweaked it on it RGB channel. I uploaded my Flower Image and then moved my BWG layers over from my Passport Image. I final had a true image of my early shoot. Yeah….the yello color limit has been meet.
Next in the digital darkroom, the yellows still were very bright, so I tamed them down using a curves layer with a Multiple screen. The fun part of the this Image was to use the free Adobe Pixel Bender plugin setting Oil Paint and add some creativity to the flower buds and background.
