Saturation

photo courtesy of Bair Art Edition

What is saturation?

"In graphics and imaging, color saturation is used to describe the intensity of color in the image. A saturated image has overly bright colors."

Saturation is a critical aspect of photography. It can bring your photo to life, it can make it a dreary sight, and it can completely ruin a photo by making it unreasonably inauthentic. How to digitally post process your saturation is beyond the scope of this course, however some cameras have some limited built in saturation controls. The images above you see, from top to bottom, an over saturated image, the original image, and desaturated image. Occasionally, amateurs will assume that more color is always better and that is not always the case. Its a fine line between a vivid strong blue ocean and an overwhelming fake and fictional blue. As you can see, with the over saturated image, no one would thinks this is a well crafted photo. This week's bit of advice, when you find yourself in post processing or changing settings on your camera, when it comes to saturation less is more .

There are times when a photo is made by the fact that it is desaturated. The are times a photo is brought to life with a little boost in the saturation. Too often are there times that a photo is ruined by too aggressive of a saturation boost.

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Is this the "Adobe Lightroom" for iPad, the professional workflow batch photograph editing tool which is only available on desktops, that people have been asking for? It doesn't quite look like it, but it may be a adequate substitute. But for 60 dollars a year? It's interesting and this may be worth keeping an eye on, but seems to be a solution for something that isn't exactly being demanded. Many professionals would much rather drop 50+ dollars on a platform that would give them the power of lightroom on a mobile device. We don't need to bring buzzwords like the cloud or social media into this.

Lessons in Exposure: Day One

Shutter speed is arguably what is going to effect your photo the most. What it does can be inferred by it's name. Think about the basics of a digital camera. The exposed sensor takes the picture that is let in through the lens.

That being said: The shutter blocks the image sensor from the light. The speed is how long the sensor is exposed to that light, which creates the picture.

The flow of the light is augmented by the current aperture of the lens, which will be discussed in another post.

As you can see from the series images on the left, courtesy of Wikipedia, the shutter speed dictates quite a few things. This camera is clearly held stable by a tripod, and is taking pictures of the same spot. Each spot is take under a different shutter speed, all the way from 1/800th of a second to a single second. As you may know, motion with the shutter open for too long is going to blur your image. This blur can be shown somewhat tastefully to show motion, but the extreme will render a picture abstract and meaningless. The water looks very fluid and slick with the long shutter speed, the water is blurred but in a path so that it's atheistically pleasing. It's important to note that if the camera wasn't on a tripod, this would not have been achieved. Alternatively, you see the jagged edges of drops of water being caught in mid air with the fastest of the shutter speeds, which is also makes an attractive image. This kind of picture however, could be caught without a tripod mind you - whereas the shutter speed was fast enough so that a steady hand wouldn't ruin the photo.

Exposure also refers to, more commonly, how bright or dark the image is. If the shutter is open for too long, your image is going to be too bright and you wont be able to see anything. Even slightly over exposed pictures have details in highlights which are blown out.

If your shutter is too quick- you risk the opposite. Your picture will be too dark, and the slightest of shadows will seem like the darkest abyss.

These are two things you must balance, along side keeping in mind how you want motion to effect your photo. It makes for difficult trade offs in situations, with the most prominent that comes to mind being low light photography. How would one capture a crisp image without blurring in low light conditions? One would thing that the shutter would just need to be open for longer to compensate, but keep in mind it would be blurred.

This is where other elements of exposure come in to play, and can help you control other elements of your photo including light, but also detail and focus.