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Why I don't like PP saturation
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 24, 2007 12:26 am    Post subject: Why I don't like PP saturation Reply with quote

Autumn is here, and it's the season when usually the saturation levers gets cranked up all the way in the editing programs of many photographers.

I personally am very cautious about software saturation, and don't use it most of the time, or only in minimal doses to help those lenses that just can't make it by themselves.

Luckily, the number of these "can't do it" lenses have drastically decreased on my shelves since I found out about the existence of the adaptors to mount on the Canon cameras the German and Russian lenses.

Today I have been out to shoot a little Autumn (in the next days I'll post the series), and so here's the occasion to reason about software saturation.

Here's a picture I took today with my MIR-38, which is not as saturating as my other MIRs. First the straight version, no post processing:



Now a saturated version, in the style you often see on so many contemporary photography forums, that makes a lot of people go all OOHS and AAHS:



At first, the saturated image captures the eye. But if you look closely into the leaves, you will see that much of the subtle shades of colours are gone. And this is only a resize, if I saturated the original size you would notice the damage done much more.
And just think about how ugly it can become once printed to a wall frame size.

The fact is, with software saturation, unless you REALLY know what you are doing, you are likely to cause much more damage to your photograph than you can make it better.
Many people think that there is only highlight clipping and shadow clipping, but there is also colour clipping. For every step that you raise the software saturation, once you reach the maximum saturation in one pixel of your image, all further saturation addition causes de facto a loss of colour resolution in your photograph.

The importance of using lenses who offer great colour density (as this is the technical term) to start with, is much evident to me. A lens that offers great colour density over all the spectrum, will not clip any colour and cause no resolution loss. It will just optimize in a natural way what is already there, or if you prefer, it will not diminish, with poor optical rendition, the richness of nature.

How many of you, like me, remember how much colour boosting was needed to get anything look decent from the 300D Kit lens?

When you use a lens that offers great colour density (and so far I have found none in the Canon EF catalogue, although i can not say to have tried them all), you don't feel the need to use the software saturation at all. And this way, you will never go wrong with your editing, because you will not have to postwork any saturation. And ultimately this turns out into a higher IQ of your photograph, because every time you do a PP action, you may gain something, but you ALWAYS lose something else. Software processing is never a take only process: it is always a give and take. With this rule, that every PP action that you stack up on your photograph, you gain less, and you lose more.


PostPosted: Wed Oct 24, 2007 12:29 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

BTW note the luscious highlight bokeh of the MIR-38B Very Happy
_


PostPosted: Wed Oct 24, 2007 9:35 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I agree, Orio. I also dislike over-saturated pictures (and that's what you get when you push the slider too much to the right. Wink)

Natural colours is what I like most, sometimes I even prefer a slight de-saturation which goes beyond your comment.

BTW: I once had an EF-lens that was great as far as saturation is concerned: EF 24-85 USM (non-L), but I had to sell it to buy my beloved Tokina 12-24. Sad


PostPosted: Wed Oct 24, 2007 3:51 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I suspect you could bring back some of that detail (which is definitely lost) by tweaking the contrast, especially if you can localize the contrast to that specific section (luminance range).


patrickh


PostPosted: Wed Oct 24, 2007 5:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Agreed - I rarely have to do anything with the saturation. Occasionally I will deepen the blue of the sky???



patrickh


PostPosted: Wed Oct 24, 2007 7:02 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Patrick, maybe I used a wrong word with "detail", I really meant colour detail as in various colour shades, I am afraid that contrast would not recover that when it's lost.


PostPosted: Thu Oct 25, 2007 12:11 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Orio, there you are correct, and I think you are talking about the subtlety of colour gradation. Saturation has a tendency to merge close colours or at least reduce the distinctions. Old eyes like mine can have difficulty picking up on those tonal niceties.


patrickh


PostPosted: Thu Oct 25, 2007 2:00 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

patrickh wrote:
Orio, there you are correct, and I think you are talking about the subtlety of colour gradation. Saturation has a tendency to merge close colours or at least reduce the distinctions.
patrickh


Yes indeed.

For those who are not familiar with how software saturation works: when you have say a red, whose R channel is at 255, and the other channels at lower value, when you raise the software saturation the reddest red stays at 255 because it can't get further, and the other, less intense reds, are boosted, becoming more and more identical to the reddest red, which, I repeat, does NOT change.
This obviously results in a compression of the tonal nuances of red, you have more reds looking "redder" and less shades of red. Up to a point of extreme saturation, where all colours tend to look more and more the same.
This is the "colour clipping" and actually when doing this you are reducing your camera's colour resolution.
So I find it quite stupid to spend a lot of money in good digital cameras that have greater colour resolution, only to boost that saturation slider and ultimately make it look like the cheapest of point-and-shoot.

So we come back to the original point: common question often asked: why is it important to buy lenses that offer great colour saturation, when with today's tools you can achieve easily colour saturation via software?
Answer is: it is VERY important to buy glass that offer great colour saturation, even today. It is true that to a certain extent, software offers you the possibility of remeding a poor colour rendering lens, something that film does not offer. However, software colour saturation has a lot of downfalls, starting with the fact that, unless you use a professional saturation program or plugin, most saturation controls, including Photoshop's, act undiscriminately on all parts of the image. So if you want to enhance that red ice cream car, you also enhance that blueish haze in the horizon and that greenish cast in the shadows on the wall.
And again, unless you are actually measuring the pixel values and making sure that you are not colour-clipping anything, your saturation actions are likely to perform destructive editing on your image, causing loss of image quality.
And finally, even if you are applying software saturation correctly, it will NEVER be the way nature does it. With changing lights, changing weather, and changing hours, nature offers its colours in a constantly everchanging set of nuances. The digital camera is, per se, a very poor medium to render colours, as it has to translate them into digital equivalent. At least, let's have a great lens in front of it, a lens that is able to take the most of what is out there. Because once the image and colours are in, you can fiddle with them, but you will never be able to REALLY make them better.

It may seem stupid to remind this, but great photography starts with great lenses. Unfortunately, the way the photographic business is going on today, manufacturers are more and more placing less value on the lenses, giving to you real pieces of junk sometimes, or selling to you as optimal lenses glass that would really be only average quality. This because is seems so easy today to fix all various lenses shortcomings via software. Get a Cheapagon polymer zoom for 300 Euros, never mind if it gives you muddy colours, soft detail, barrel lines and vignetted corners. With your Soandso software, you can boost saturation, enhance sharpness, debarrel all geometric lines and raise corner luminosity. Who cares if with every action you perform your IQ degrades a little? This is photography of the new millennium, stop asking for better quality lenses and enjoy the consumer ride!


PostPosted: Thu Oct 25, 2007 3:19 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

DxO actually boasts that their software can make a camera photo look as though it was taken on a pro machine. Sad. It also encourages laziness in composition, actually setting the shoot and taking note of the light. Digital is slowly encouraging people who might have become keen amateurs into pj's with a motor driven machine, snapping everything that moves (oir doesn't).


patrickh


PostPosted: Thu Jan 03, 2008 2:17 am    Post subject: Re: Why I don't like PP saturation Reply with quote

Orio wrote:

The fact is, with software saturation, unless you REALLY know what you are doing, you are likely to cause much more damage to your photograph than you can make it better.
Many people think that there is only highlight clipping and shadow clipping, but there is also colour clipping. For every step that you raise the software saturation, once you reach the maximum saturation in one pixel of your image, all further saturation addition causes de facto a loss of colour resolution in your photograph.


A good point. When adjusting overall lightness there is the good way (adjust the curve, so black and white stay put) and the bad way (as 'lightness' slider that moves everything up or down a constant amount. Unfortunately for saturation there is frequently only the bad way that increases all saturation equally. It seems that what is needed for software adjustment is a curve-like control so that greys stay grey, fully saturated colors stay the same, and middling saturations can be smoothly adjusted.

Which is not to argue against your point about getting the saturation in a lens rather than in PP, just to say that PP saturation could be done better too.