Sunday, February 04, 2007

Red and Yellow lights

It is a strange phenomenon of the light that in the picture I posted below, it looks like the topmost light is yellow. On the other picture you can see that it is actually red, and the middle one is yellow. It must be due to the overload that happens in a photograph. The eye has a much bigger dynamic range, so clear colors retain their clarity as they become brighter, whereas in a photo you can't add more light to them, so you have to add white, and they loose their cleanness of color.


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting phenomenon.

I understand that the image in its camera raw format has a lot more dynamic range than the final RGB rendition (i.e. JPG or TIFF file), so ...

Would there be a natural way to "fix" the above issue by adjusting how the raw-to-RGB conversion is done by using Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture? At least that's what Apple's and Adobe's marketing literature would have us believe.

I haven't tried either of these products so I am only guessing here.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

I don't know. In my brief tests earlier, I could not see any marked difference between RAW and JPG, except file size, so I mostly shoot JPG.

Anonymous said...

I can see the difference now eolake. It is strange how before the top appeared yellow in color but when you did the comparison the middlelight is certainly yellow.
Thanks for showing the other photograph compared to the one I mistook for yellow.