Red feather details not distinct

[wlliment]

Hi,

I have observed from my photos and other bird photos that the details of red feathers are not distinct unlike the other colored feathers. They look like one whole mass of red color. Is this due to exposure problems? How can I overcome this problem.
Thanks.

William

[John Chardine]

Hi William- this is a common problem especially for certain reds which are made up of mostly red and not much green and blue in the RGB colour space. These reds seem to be quite common in the natural world. You can think of reds like these as "highlights" in your image, and therefore you need to protect them from clipping or they are easily over-exposed. If a scene is generally of darkish, mixed colour tones but has a red feature your camera meter will expose for the scene and you could push the reds in the feature to full saturation and therefore lose detail.

The way around this in camera is to make sure you have the red, green and blue histograms showing up on your LCD and come up with an exposure that does not show a bar at the very right hand side of the red histogram, which if there would indicate that some of the red channel is fully saturated (clipped, blown etc). The correct exposure for the reds may result in an underexposed scene in general but this is the compromise you have to make. HDR may be a way out.

In post-processing there are various ways to reduce the saturation in the red channel. The best time to do this in at the raw development stage.

Finally, converting and saving a raw image as a jpeg in the sRGB colour space can sometimes push the reds to the right and clip them.

Look at these very useful BPN threads from some time ago:

http://www.birdphotographers.net/forums/showthread.php/29869
http://www.birdphotographers.net/forums/showthread.php/29761

[Declan Troy]

Hey William,

John's answer is probably the one you need but I'll add a footnote that there may be an element of biology in what you noted. Birds that have vibrant red colors based on carotenoids (perhaps redundant as other red pigments tend not to be vibrant) often have modified feather structure such that the feather barbules are flattened so you don't have as detailed feathery appearance of typical feathers.

Declan

[John Chardine]

That's an interesting point Declan. I had not heard of that. Time to go and do a little research!

[wlliment]

Thanks John and Declan for the answers. I really appreciate it.

[Declan Troy]

Here are a couple of articles to start you on your research. I had to go way back to find some with some pics; I'm sure I have some better but it seems my recall isn't what it used to be.

Brush, A.H. and H. Seifried 1968 Pigmentation and feather structure in genetic variants of the gouldian finch (Poephila gouldiae) Auk 85:416-430

Olson, S.L. 1970 Specializations Of Some Carotenoid-Bearing Feathers. Condor 72:424-430.

[David Stephens]

As explained, reds are easy to over saturate when the camera is reading an entire scene with just a relatively small element of red included. Whites, yellows and oranges can also be problematic.
Generally, -EV is needed to preserve the details by not blowing out the color. Turn on your highlight warnings in your preview screen, including RGB, if available for you camera.

[Ed Cordes]

I usually adjust the reds down in Lightroom a few percentage points to avoid this.

[Diane Miller]

I'm late to this, but another processing idea (for LR or ACR) is to look at the Profile choices in the Camera Calibration tab. For me, Adobe Standard always comes up as the default, but some of the other choices, such as Camera Faithful or Camera Neutral will often tame the reds and bring out detail very nicely without dulling down too many other colors. Then everything is tweaked further in the HSL panel. (I have this problem with my Acorn Woodpeckers.)

This is with Canon 5D-series cameras -- other brands may differ.