Why I don't like PP saturation

[Orio]

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.

[Orio]

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

[LucisPictor]

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. )

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.

[patrickh]

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

[patrickh]

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



patrickh

[Orio]

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.

[patrickh]

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

[Orio]

[patrickh]

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

[ChrisLilley]