Thanks Maru for the feedback, this is always welcome. I'm trying to find a decent recipe for white, another problem I get is when taking photos of white (actually with any color) my camera kinda unifies the tones. I lose a lot of contrast. In the pics white looks like flat white/light grey in reality there's quite contrast to it. Going from medium grey to pure white but it's not showing in the pics. I use Nikon D5300 with AF-P 18-55 VR lens. Does someone have any tips?
a lot of tips :) first of use NEF format as a default (RAW ) this keep way more colours and countraST and you can get this fixed later other thing i d to not use to low F or to high as this will cut a light to much or let way to much in case of black backdrop or white ones this require completly different settings other is use iso 100 the white range of details is 1/3 of whole light spectrum of this camera rest is black - so you whant to get as much range in bright tones - you may try a white backdrop or grey neutral (white will burn the photo) neutral grey will give you most of of tonal range but poor contrast - but this can be fixed easy in case of b;lack hard part is a level when a contrast get cut off - other thing is a Nicon specyfic that make red more vibrant and blue and grey way lighter then compared to lets say Sony or Olympus
Great, thanks Maru. I take my pics in raw format as you said and ISO is set to 100 and F11-F13. I raise F to 22 for army photos. I'll try some adjustment suggested.
no no f 22 is way to high - you will loos a lot of light and sharpnes in favor of depth of field but try - it may actualy increrse grey scale colours but i was thinking about F 7 ~9 - depth of field is shalow but light that get in is way bigger so colours should be better replicated - but this is just theory - you need to check as all digital cameras got there own problems o and set colours to ADOBE theme - should widen a grey scale and mute reds
F11-13 should be fine if you use a tripod and longer exposure times. Most lenses loose some sharpness with extreme settings, so F22 should be tested.
Then you should check if you can use mirror lock-up too (maybe you have to enable, maybe it comes default in some modes). Even less vibrations. Also worth is investigating the quality of the lamps, and using flash (off camera, if you have one, or at least bounced/redirected for the in camera one).
Oh, cool I will check that option in my camera. I will post a picture of my set up. I have two pair of bulbs, 23W (daylight 6500K) fluorescent bulbs and 13W(4000K) LED bulbs. Tsyklon pictures were taken under Led bulbs. I really need to sort this problem, It gets on my nerves.
This is the EXIF data for Tsyklon picture. Will this be ok? Camera NIKON CORPORATION NIKON D5300 Date of Creation 2018:03:24 18:21:37 Resolution 1077x1694 Make NIKON CORPORATION Model NIKON D5300 Aperture..............13 Exposure Time....1/8 (0.125 sec) Focal Length........32.0 mm Flash....................No Flash file Size................1551 kB File Type..............JPEG MIME Type...........image/jpeg Image Width........1077 Image Height.......1694 Encoding Process....Progressive DCT, Huffman coding Bits Per Sample..........8 Color Components.....3 X Resolution..........72 Y Resolution..........72 Software................GIMP 2.8.22 YCbCr Sub Sampling........YCbCr44 (1 1) YCbCr Positioning.............Unknown (0) Exposure Program.............Manual Date and Time (Original)....2018:03:24 18:21:37 Date and Time (Digitized)...2018:03:24 18:21:37 Max Aperture Value.............4.4 Metering Mode..........Multi-segment Light Source..............Cool White Fluorescent Color Space..............Unknown (0) Exposure Index.........N/A Sensing Method........One-chip color area F Number..................13 Exposure Compensation...N/A ISO...........................100, 100 Orientation Horizontal (normal)
Color Space..............Unknown (0) - should be Adobe Light Source..............Cool White Fluorescent ?? - your light bulbs they got light specyfied ? (ye they have ) 4000k for led should be Neutral white (daylight 6500K) - this is so called studio day light cold im using 5600 k so basicly set WB manualy to current lamps you use so set manualy to 4000k or 6500 k it is a nice and quics explanation this should solve a lot of problems and ADOBE color space should add depths to the grey and white and cut a bit from red and green
Oh, thanks this makes things a lot clearer. Yes the bulbs used are 4000K, too bad i can't set the white balance by number just with bulb options like "Light Source..............Cool White Fluorescent". I need to check that abode seting. Yes it's already on adobe.
this is damn strange DLRS shoud have a numerical setting .. but any way you should have a set from source use this - set whole scene turn on lamps then put there a white "template" (like a white paper ) then use calibration - it will set WB to current situation and then you got this calibrated correctly other thing this 4000k lamps are fluorescent long lamps ot it is other way newer light source ? as in case of old long lamps color corection is way harder as light spectrum is actualy not complete in case of this old lamp emissions - so what lamps are thous ??
I'll try to set white balance manually. These are new LED bulbs. Really appreciate all the help, Maru.
Another thing to test, the lamp spectrum. Get a CD, the silver kind (factory stamped, not home burnt). With only the light you want to test on, look at the rainbow streaks in the CD surface. Smooth rainbows are OK (compare to Sun), if you see really bright spikes in some colors and others nearly missing, use different lamps, the fluorescent coating or light emitters are not good for photos because they will change colors a lot. All this is approximate (visual, not exact measurements), but if the rainbows are really weird, try different lamps. Lamp CRI is a helper when reading the lamp boxes, but not a warranty (you can get ones with >85 and still be bad, but a 70 is going to be bad).
As promised here is my photo set up. I made a few changes in my camera settings suggested by Maru and others. I played with white balance a bit, used grey background for manual setting. Lowered F and few other things. I pretty sure the colours are more accurate but I still can't fix the contrast issue. Here is my latest mini.
Have you touched up the background or what looks grey in the table image becomes black in the final images due camera settings?
new fotos are way better the thing i c is a bit over blown photo - over exposed would say 0.3 over exposed even saturation feel right - you may try to crank up saturation of colours if they do not look enught saturated as strong light "eats up " saturation
