Mike Russell wrote:
I’m there – where’s my ticket? Neutrals occur in natural settings as well. The lower margins of cumulis clouds, for example.
Mike, let me know when you are visiting, we’ll go have a drink. When over the ocean they have a bluish lower part, when over land they’ll pick up the ground color.
I’ve learned to trust a cumulus only when I am sailing, never when I shoot π
You’re correct that there
may be natural settings where no reliable neutrals may be found. In this situation, I think a gray card is not very useful because the distances can be so great,
the lighting varies so much over a large distance, and in sun versus shade, and objects may filter the light, and reflect color on one another.
But the light temperature is the same, and the key light source is situated 150,000,000 km from your subject so a few km will not have a great effect.
Relying on knowledge of what good foliage, blue ocean, and sky
looks like during subsequent color correction guarantees a good result, and is not really helped by having a gray card in a specific spot in the image.
I use the gray card as a poor man’s thermocolorimeter, worked every time for me so far.
That said, I see no problem with whatever method you use to get your images, since they turn out so well.
Merçi!
That is precisely where a "true" gray card comes handy IMHO
Except that it won’t really be true gray, and it will not necessarily have any relationship to the "true gray" that your eye seeks out when looking at the scene. This is the important difference, I think between injecting an artificial gray object into the scene, versus usng an actual object in the scene.
I must be missing your point here, I don’t understand. Is the card not an actual object? I think it is, and better: it is a really gray object 100% artificial and controlled
For example, in a sunset with mixed reds and blues, it will not be
practical to use a gray card because of the distances involved, nor will it be helpful because the card’s gray color may be illuminated by orange light from the sunset.
Well yes, a color cast colorizes the gray. You tell PS: I know this is in fact true gray, make it true gray again, and gone is the cast. Even better if you have White, Gray, and Black.(works only when cards facing the lens at perfect angle BTW)
Of course for a sunset you want a cast, that’s the whole idea isn’t it?
Skin colors comes in so may variations, and worse, you spend a day outside and yours changes!
Is the pale or the tan correct?
Both will have a hue angle close to 15 degrees, and a saturation of 10 to 30 percent. It turns out that this is the case for almost everyone on the planet. Skin brightness, of course, may vary, but that is not dealt with by the gray card in any case.
I trust you on that one, I never measured myself.
Aloha,
Stephan