Blue Week, Day 1

© 2009 Simon Hucko

I went and walked around campus here at Cornell a week ago and took some photos. It was a beautiful sunny day, and when I imported the lot and started editing I realized that there was a lot of blue. So... it's time for blue week! I'll post a new one every day this week with a little quip about it and possibly a tip or two.

Today's photo was taken at the lake on campus, and makes use of the reflection of the trees in the water. You can see I have a "rule of thirds" thing going on with the water line to separate the picture, which is a typical composition for landscape photography. The log and grass in the lower right hand corner help to break up the reflection and add a little interest to the foreground.

However, you'll notice a giant line across the sky instead of a nice gradient. That wasn't there when I was editing on my computer, and is a result of converting from a RAW adobeRGB file to a sRGB jpeg. sRGB is a smaller color space than adobeRGB, meaning that it can't represent as wide a range of colors. Usually you won't notice anything after the conversion, but in this case there was a gap in the blues for the gradient in the sky, resulting in that ugly line. There also may be some compression artifacts going from the raw file to jpeg. If I were to have this printed I would save it as a 16 bit .tif file in adobeRGB and make sure the printer was aware of the issue and did what they could to prevent any banding. I could also go back to the original file and convert it to sRGB right away, so that after editing there wouldn't be any issues with conversion.

I'm not going to worry about it, as I'm not planning on having it printed, but it's a good example to make you aware of these things. Always check and double check your images in the right file type and color space before having them printed, or you could be surprised by some nasty results.

~S

[title of blog] on flickr