7 replies to this topic

[Petrea]

Hello there,

 

Can anyone give me any advice on this:

 

I´ve enjoyed my Coolpix B700 for quite some years now and taken thousands of great photos (I think!).. Only one problem keeps bothering me: I cannot get good photos of a certain corner of my garden! Mainly plants with different shades of blue flowers grow there, as well as one with white. In particular, the light blue ones never get the credit they deserve.

 

I have tried to several settings of daylight, but only got minor improvements - if any!

 

I enclose an example (std setting).

 

Regards

Petrea

[Merco_61]

Get a gray card and use it to set the white balance for each session when you really need the colours to be spot on. With some editors, you can profile the light if you shoot a colorchecker chart for each situation. The Colorchecker Passport is small enough to keep in a pocket or your camera bag so you have it handy. Remember that the calibration targets deteriorate over time and should be replaced now and then. X-rite recommend yearly replacement, but I usually stretch this to 18 months without any problems. It is the UV that breaks down the pigments, so a shorter interval is probably necessary if you live closer to the equator as the UV light is more intense.

[Petrea]

Thank you for the reply.

 

Colorchecker Passport!? Hmm, Hope it comes with instructions, because there is nothing about it in the Coolpix manual.

 

Regards

Petrea

[Merco_61]

You need an editor that can use a colour chart to profile the light. 
 

Photo Ninja does this natively.

Adobe apps are supported by X-Rite. https://support.xrit...n-Photoshop.pdf

Affinity can use the ICC profiles from the X-rite app. https://forum.affini...affinity-photo/

 

This is for getting colours right in postprocessing.

 

Your B700 should have a way to set the white balance right from a gray card, this should be somewhere in the manual. This will produce colour-correct-ish files straight out of your camera. They won’t be as highly corrected as doing it in post, but should be close. 

[Ron]

Only one problem keeps bothering me: I cannot get good photos of a certain corner of my garden! Mainly plants with different shades of blue flowers grow there, as well as one with white. In particular, the light blue ones never get the credit they deserve.

Hi Petrea. Do you happen to know the names of the plants that you're unable to get good blue color on?

 

--Ron

[Petrea]

i have tried to play with the white balance, with only minor improvements, hardly worth the trouble. And I tried correcting using Picasa and the possibilities offered by Google Photos. A bit more luck than with the white balance settings. Will try those suggested by Merco-61 then, thank you.

 

Recently, I tried taking photos when everything was in the shade, and that came out much better. But that is not always possible - and we all like the sunshine, don´t we?

 

It seems that the photo I attached has not shown up. The flowers there were Ipomea purpurea, Duranta repens andThunbergia grandiflora.

 

Regards

Petrea

[Merco_61]

Have you tried the white balance procedure on page 133 in the reference manual?

 

This usually brings you much closer to reality than the other, canned, white balance settings.

 

The last coolpix I owned was a 5700, so I am not up to speed on how the current models work…

 

You might get better results shooting in raw and editing in NX Studio. This app is free to download at Nikon’s support site for your region and is available for reasonably current Windows and MacOS versions.

[chuckt]

There are some colors that your eyes see one way and the cameras record another way. This problem is caused by UV absorption in the flower petals. In extreme cases you're never going to get eyeball accuracy.

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