Decisions, decisions

[jlw]

Not especially looking for advice here, just sympathy...

...I had put together a video for a friend, and needed to design a label for the DVD that I could print onto it using my inkjet printer (Epson R800.) So, I was looking for a nice photo to go on it.

One tricky thing about picking photos for DVDs is that if you use one that's very dark, it uses up a huge amount of ink and takes forever to dry. And another tricky thing is that photos tend to be rectangular, whereas a DVD is round and has a hole in the middle!

Still, I found one that I thought would work, made with my R-D 1 and 35/1.2 Voigtlander lens:

Now of course I had broken all kinds of rules here, such as shooting against very strong backlight and letting the highlights burn out. (And yes, I know that if I had been shooting film instead of digital, I might have been able to save the highlights.) Normally I don't worry too much about that kind of stuff.

But I noticed that if I looked at the picture very closely -- more closely than you probably can see in the small image above -- I was getting some purple fringing around the edge of the girl's hand and head. I don't think the R-D 1 is any worse in this department than anything else -- it just seems to be one of the things that can happen when you "push the envelope" with a digital camera.

So I decided to convert the image to grayscale, and got this:

Well, I kinda liked it. But I wasn't sure it was better than the color image.

I did go ahead and use the grayscale one for the DVD label, partly just because I thought it would be kind of radical to have a very subtle label. I thought it turned out nicely:

But you know what? I STILL don't know whether I like the color image or the grayscale image better! It's great that shooting digital gives you more choices, but sometimes having more choices just makes it harder to make up your mind...

 

[rich815]

In this case, IMO, the color image is much better than the B&W one.

 

[Stephanie Brim]

One of the reasons I still don't shoot digital...among a host of others.

I like the black and white one. Imagine that.

 

[ChrisN]

Not especially looking for advice here, just sympathy......

Yeah, well, a guy that shoots like you do certainly needs lots of sympathy. Not.


Nice work.

 

[sevres_babylone]

I prefer the colour one. I like the delicacy of the colours, and I think the green/gold contrast (the gold sash? on the main dancer as opposed to the green ones on the dancers watching) is very effective in the colour image.

 

[RML]

The colour pic has my vote. However, the grayscale pic may be the better choice for the job. Perhaps you could increase the contrast, or deepen at least the blacks. I feel the pic is little bland right now but that's just my opinion, of course.

 

[louisb]

I like both and it would be hard to choose between them. You could play with the channels on the b&w one for hours getting all sorts of interesting effects. I think using the b&w for the label does give it a certain sophistication and grace.

LouisB

 

[Terao]

Like the B&W one. And you're right, it looks kind of radical as a CD cover. I like the composition as well

 

[Thardy]

I like the color pic as a stand alone shot, but the B&W seems to work for the DVD label.

 

[jlw]

I hope that this is ok of me of doing, but I took your pic and lassoed the corlourful waistband of the balerina. Then inverted it and brought the saturation down. Just wanted to give you some more ideas. I dont know if this is apropriate to do, so please tell me if it isnt. I like the one in colour the best.

Yes, doing that was okay and in fact I really like the result. It's an interesting idea that's worth exploring further.

It also gives me another idea: The main reason I started out converting the image to grayscale was to get rid of the purple fringes caused by the extreme backlight, but maybe I could just lasso those and desaturate them.

Now that I think of it, this thread has reminded me of an experience I used to have frequently during my black-and-white printing days: Often I'd have to let an image "rest" for a while (often months, occasionally years) before I could decide what to do with it in printing. It seemed that I needed time to forget whatever expectations I had had in my head when I had taken the picture, so I could just see what was actually in the negative and deal with it.

This discussion has helped me see that I need to carry this process across to digital as well. It's so easy to get caught up in the immediacy of digital imaging that I hadn't thought of it before.

Thanks, y'all...

 

[Gray Fox]

If you have Photoshop CS2 or newer and if your images can be read by Adobe Camera Raw, it is easy to rid the photo of the purple fringe and work with the exposure and contrast at the same time. Just a thought. I mention this simply because of the two I'd rather see a bit of the delicate color as it seems to convey more of the mood of the image. I, too, like the composition, even with the hole in the middle.

 

[jlw]

If you have Photoshop CS2 or newer and if your images can be read by Adobe Camera Raw, it is easy to rid the photo of the purple fringe and work with the exposure and contrast at the same time.

Thanks for the suggestion. I've got both Photoshop CS2 and Adobe Lightroom, which has a similar color-fringing-removal tool. But it didn't seem to do me much good in this case.

Both the Photoshop and Lightroom tools work well on what Adobe insists on calling "chromatic aberration" (even though that's technically a lens fault, whereas the usual red/green or blue/yellow fringing found on digital images is an artifact of the digitizing process.) You can recognize that type of fringing because it's one color on one side and the opposite color on the other, and by tweaking the controls you can neutralize it out pretty well.

But this control didn't seem to have any effect on the particular type of purple fringing found all around heavily-overexposed edges, such as the one in my original image.

I'm not sure this is a lens fault OR a digital-imaging artifact -- it might be caused instead by "bounceback" from the sensor surface being re-reflected by the rear of the lens back onto the sensor. That would explain why the Adobe tools didn't affect it.

Here's a cropped section of the original image in case anyone wants to suggest theories. Notice how the purple cast is distributed fairly symmetrically inward from the edges, rather than tending toward one direction or the other. This section is almost dead-center in the original frame (see earlier post for the full view) so this type of symmetrical fringing is what I'd expect if it is in fact sensor bounceback:

 

[robertasumendi]

CD Cover

CD Cover

As a designer, I'd say the single most important thing you can do to improve things is to dodge out all the detail in the windows.

I'd personally go with the b&w or ErikFive's desaturated version....