Color Balance
Last weekend me and my wife were in and around St. Michaels, MD for our first anniversary. Being avid shutter bugs, of course, we took a lot of gear with us and I got a chance to get a real working out of my new Nikon D70 digital SLR. Here are a few selected images, but if you want to see more, check them out on my Smugmug account.
Now, the one qualification that I should mention is that none of these have undergone any “post-processing” (editing to make them look better), other than converting them to jpegs from their original RAW format with Breezebrowser, which also does some noise reduction in the process.
This brings me to something I’ve mentioned on the D70 Yahoo! Group recently. Basically, I’m the type of person who likes to procrastinate. I have another tendency towards perfectionism in some things (certainly not everything!), so when mixed they can often cause lots of delay. This is the case when it comes to taking pictures with the D70. I know a fair degree about photography, but this is my first digital SLR. So I had to read the manual from cover to cover, and then got Thom Hogan’s Excellent eBook and read that as well. Then I started in on Deke McLelland’s Adobe Photoshop CS One-on-One, which I’m about ¾ of the way done reading. Next is Scott Kelby’s Adobe Photoshop CS for Digital Photographers, which I’ve heard great things about, and finally Bruce Fraser’s Real World Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS. I could probably buy another 100 books on Adobe Photoshop and photography, but at least for now I wanted to get through as much of that stuff before taking lots of pictures. I have this fear that I will take lots of pictures which will add to my growing collection of stuff that I still have yet to do any post-processing on because I don’t feel I know how best to make an image look its best – more on this below. Luckily I was able to put that aside over the weekend and took over a hundred shots. Still nothing huge compared to many, but not bad considering I don’t normally take tons of shots of the same thing the way a lot of people do.
As I’ve been going through Deke’s book, I’ve learned a lot about various tools and methods in Photoshop, but the one thing that’s nagged me the whole time is that I never got a sense of why I was doing certain things, and then it hit me! I am, as I may have mentioned here before, color blind. There are various types of color-blindness and I don’t have the very rare type where you can’t see any color. I have the much more common type (apparently 10% of men have this) where one set of the color-recepter “cones” in my eyes are not as sensitive to their given wavelength of light that they are supposed to be. Like with monitors and image sensors in digital cameras, humans have receptors for the red, green, and blue components of light. Apparently either my red or green cones (or perhaps both) aren’t quite up to the job. This doesn’t mean I don’t see colors, but it’s harder for me to tell the difference between certain reds and greens. A blue that might have a little red in it, making it violet, I will see as just blue. This also means that certain colors that have read and/or green may look darker to me than they would to someone else.
It’s all very interesting, but I was hoping that it would not mean that I couldn’t effectively work with Photoshop, since I’ve found it a really fun learning experience, and it would be great to take images that don’t look all that great in their original form and really make them into something stunning. I was sent to this site that had a Photoshop plug-in, but apparently it was only to show a normal person how something might look to a color-blind person. I needed the opposite, but such a plug-in has not been created yet, although they do have web applications that emulate it. Even so, I began to wondering how it would work. Color is such a subjective thing to begin with. If I get something that allows me to see with “normal” vision, won’t it look “wrong” to me? When I make corrections, won’t some of them be to make the image look more like what it does when I view it in real life, in which case I will actually be making it look wrong for those with normal vision? Wouldn’t it make more sense to work on it without filters? Then again, if a green to me looks dark to me because my eyes aren’t picking up the light, and I push the brightness up in order to make it more visible, it will probably look positively radioactive for a person with normal sight!
Maybe there just is no way to get around it except for some future implanted video filtering system that would pump up red and/or green light in my optic nerve enough to compensate. But I can’t even contemplate laser surgery for near-sightedness, let alone something more invasive. Maybe they will build something into glasses or contacts that will eliminate color-blindness. But then it’s a matter of rewiring the brain to accept the new information as normal. I just wonder if the brain, not seeing what it’s used to, will actually change my perception of the colors in order to make them look more normal. I remember hearing back in high school about how the eye actually sees things upside down but the brain turns it right side up in order to make more sense of it. They apparently did experiments where they gave people glasses with lenses that turned things upside down again and after living with these glasses on day and night for an extended period, their brains again rewired in order to make their vision right-side up. Then when they removed the glasses, the normal vision of the people was upside down! Until of course their brains had time to rewire themselves yet again. It’s enough to give you headache thinking about this stuff!