Illumina Photo Works

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Color

As I photographed the turtles under incandescent lights — too red. Right: as I Photoshopped it using masking, levels, other tricks. The base and background should be neutral, so I kept tweaking it. It might be that I made it too green, and not yellow enough. Photographed with a Nikon D200

We think of sunlight as yellow, because we think the sun is yellow. But it isn't. The light it shines is blue because our sun burns blue hot (about 6,000 degrees Kelvin). We usually do not notice the color of sunlight because it is the light we expect. Our brains automatically adjust for the differences from one light source color to another, but film and digital cameras do not.

If you use light other than the mid-day (approximately 10 am till 4 pm) sun, precisely rendered colors are less likely. Early morning, late afternoon and evening sunlight is redder, and as lovely as that is, it is not much good for photographing art accurately.

Under midday direct sunlight, colors are easy. Most film and nearly all digital cameras (unless set otherwise) expect and assume sunlight. If you use something else, it is guesswork. Anything but sunlight tends to be confusing to both users and cameras/film.

Adjusting what we see as white

White Great Egret shot at the color setting

for Tungsten light bulbs I set the night before.

Thank goodness for digital cameras with adjustable White Balance settings.

I won't buy a serious camera without it, because I shoot under a variety of light sources, only some of which I have control over. Nine years ago, I had to wait six months to get my Sony F707, then the only Prosumer camera which had that feature.

Unfortunately, not many digital cameras have manual White Balance, and most automatic White Balance features on digital cameras (including expensive ones) don't work well under all lights. Canon cameras, for instance, have notoriously bad White Balance under tungsten lights (or else they believe consumers want to render light bulb light as reddish, which does look romantic). You still have to check feature lists and read camera reviews carefully.

My expensive Nikon D300 allows me to make color balance adjustments for a variety of light sources, so I can dial the exact color in degrees Kelvin for almost any kind of a source (halogen, fluorescent or tungsten bulb, lamp, candle or sunlight under differing circumstances), but it's still iffy with mixed light sources — like daylight plus the dreaded fluorescent and other light source combinations, and its automatic white balance fares poorly (goes reddish) with ordinary light bulbs.

Mixed lighting — like in galleries with big windows and light bulbs — can vary by the inch from warm to cool, and homes with mixed lighting can be a challenge to adjust to. Sometimes I can set the camera before I shoot. Sometimes, because I shoot Raw, I can change the color in Photoshop later. Sometimes I can't do either.

Mixing light sources is a hassle. If you are shooting "indoor" film or digital with indoor lights, and there is an unblocked window letting in outside light (which is probably brighter than anything indoors) so it can shine on or reflect in your art, some or all of your art may be rendered blue instead of the color you expect. Not a major problem with digital (if you know how to use masking in an image manipulation program or how to tune that one color out), but tough luck on film.

If you shoot art inside or near color objects, those objects' color(s) can reflect in the art. I love my Parrot Green (It feels warm in winter and cool in summer.) living room, but I know better than to photograph art there, because when I did, the green walls turned it a sickly shade. Our brains adjust. Cameras and film don't.

Colored walls and ceilings are prime suspects for color shifts, but if you have a big red couch where it can reflect in your art, it can make your art pink. Even outside, a big green tree, a bright yellow garage or red bricks can alter color subtly or substantially. The blue paint on the ceiling of your porch can ruin warm hues.

ISO and Visual Noise

Left and right: Low (80) and high (1600) ISO — an extreme example to make a point. Spider & Skeleton art by my friend Tre Roberts, photographed in my front window with lots of sunlight on the other side and not much on this side. Note the low noise and high contrast in the low ISO shot on the left and the high noise and low contrast in the right image.

Film and other materials are rated by the International Standards Organization (ISO) according to their relative sensitivity to light. If you use film, use slow film to photograph art. If you use digital, set the camera to a low ISO setting.

We used to call this sensitivity "film speed" or "ASA" (American Standards Association), and it is still expressed as a number, with lower numbers indicating less sensitivity.

With either film or digital, the lower the speed, the lower the visual noise and the higher the contrast. Conversely, the higher the ISO, the higher the noise and the lower the apparent contrast. Grain looks like noise in the image. Fine grain usually looks better than coarse grain.

In film, visible grain was a clumping of light-sensitive silver halides suspended in the hardened gelatin of the film.

In digital, the same effect is caused by other factors, which can be somewhat controlled in PP (Post Production) via image-editing software or a plug-in noise-remover. In digital that "graininess" is called visual noise, which comes in two varieties — color noise and contrast noise — with essentially similar results that look a lot like film grain.

I often use Nik's DFine plug-in for the full-blown (and expensive) version of Photoshop, but there are other noise-reduction plug-ins that work with that and other programs. Photoshop Elements is a good, inexpensive — about $70 — program that will probably suit your art-photographing needs at first. Using digital photographs without editing tends to look amateurish and does not show your art to its best advantage.

At the least, you should correct the tonal range, contrast, color saturation and composition of your images, although more discussion of those techniques is beyond the scope of this article. (See Levels, below.)

80 or 100 is the lowest ISO available on most digital cameras, although 200 is the base ISO of my dSLR. Some even very expensive digital cameras render images that are so noisy at any rating higher than 100, that they are unusable for photographing art. Newer, better and only sometimes more expensive digicams can render images at higher ISO ratings very well. Most professional camera reviews show sample photographs at different ISO settings.

Some cameras are much better than others at controlling noise in high-ISO photographs.

I'll repeat: in general, it is best to use low ISO camera settings when photographing art. Putting the camera on a firm, secure tripod is also recommended