Digital Camera Blues…literally

NS
Posted By
Nancy S
Jul 13, 2003
Views
285
Replies
14
Status
Closed
I very recently bought from a family member an Olympus Camedia D-40 Zoom digital camera. In some pictures which I took last week (at Auto setting)I notice some unrealistic color, too much blue in certain areas like;
* man’s shirt
* wedding dress and veil There are purple outlines of white areas and along her arms when over her dress.
The white flowers and all teeth read a good RGB value, not weighted toward blue.

Though this is a crummy jpg I think you’ll notice quite easily my objections.

This image I took in the shade on a totally cloudless day at 11K feet in Colorado. Is this blueing just sky reflecting? Perhaps my camera settings are inaccurate, I am brand new to this camera.

All ideas are welcome.

<http://www.pbase.com/image/19038525>

Nancy
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NS
Nancy S
Jul 13, 2003
The "Manual"…

yes, one does exist and I’m sure it would be helpful, but it’s not in my possession (which is why I was shooting in Auto mode temporarily)

I’m mentally prepared for another search of Dad’s house to find said manual. He is 84 and has never thrown anything away in his life, but locating any particular item is usually an unfulfilling experience!

Nancy
CS
Chuck Snyder
Jul 13, 2003
Nancy, I’ve seen this phenomenon before in image taken in deep shade with lots of sunlight in the background; some I’ve seen take on a greenish cast instead of blue, perhaps from surrounding vegetation in those cases. Perhaps in this case that beautiful sky is the culprit…

The color cast improves substantially when I select a white point in her dress or his shirt for the Levels Adjustment Layer although the saturation is a bit strong for my taste.

Reading the review by Steve (www.steves-digicams) gives no clue to a particular problem; it’s one of his most highly recommended cameras. May have to chalk it up to very difficult lighting conditions…

Chuck
CS
Chuck Snyder
Jul 13, 2003
Jodi, looks like you’re a "steve’s" fan, too!

🙂

Chuck
CS
Chuck Snyder
Jul 13, 2003
Jodi, I go back there time and again, sometimes for myself, sometimes to help answer a question on the forum. Definitely a site in which I have a great deal of confidence!
NS
Nancy S
Jul 13, 2003
Chuck and Jodi,

Thanks for doing background for me and the posts.

Chuck,

Affirming your correction techniques, yes, I can tweak these photos in PSE for good results, but if error is caused by the operator, I can fix that instead of having to fix each photo. My hunch, which was why I posted, allowed for that tremendous blue sky in thin air to reflect on the large white areas… difficult lighting. You have seen examples of this before you say…good to know. This camera is very customizable and has many user adjustable settings, I just need the manual to learn from as I’m sure Auto will not be my preferred setting.

I appreciate the return posts.

Nancy
JF
Jodi Frye
Jul 13, 2003
Nancy, here are the specs ;

<http://www.geodatasys.com/d40.htm>
CS
Chuck Snyder
Jul 13, 2003
Nancy, you may want to try to take some pictures in RAW mode and do all the adjustments in Elements. If you do shoot in JPEG, I would leave the in-camera settings for sharpness, contrast and saturation at 0 and then maybe experiment to see if those should be tweaked. You may want to play some with white balance, but I leave mine on Auto all the time and take care of the occasional color cast as outlined by you some months ago…!

Chuck
P
Phosphor
Jul 14, 2003
Nancy – my guess is with the others that playing with the white balance might help – in tough lighting conditions the presets or setting a manual WB work better on my camera than the auto setting. Shooting in RAW as Chuck suggests also helps as it’s easier to fiddle with the WB afterwards, and it does give a better result than post processing with Elements.
I can’t see the purple outlines very clearly on the JPEG – but it sounds a bit like chromatic aberration – my G3 gives noticeable purple/blue fringing on high contrast areas – where slightly overexposed white meets with a darker background – tree branches silhoutted against the sky type of thing. If that’s what this is, to avoid it you need to use a smaller aperture and avoid overexposing light areas (bring up shadow detail in Elements rather than correctly expose for the shadowed area in the original picture); discussion on DPreview Canon forum suggests that a UV filter may help – it does seem to do so to some extent with my G3.

Susan S.
GD
Grant Dixon
Jul 14, 2003
Susan

I too have seen this purple and blue fringe and while it referred to as Chromatic Aberration, a problem with lenses, it think it is not this. True we do have colour fringes on all too many digital cameras made by a variety of quality camera manufacturers. The technology of lens manufacturing is such that it would have be a very shoddy quality control to pass lenses this bad. What I suspect we are seeing is a affectation of overloading the CCD or CMOS chips. These chips use something called a Bayer filter pattern and this gives an over abundance of green so the red and blue have to be boosted to accommodate this and the mixture of these two colours do make purple. The Foeveon chip do Doesn’t use the Bayer filter pattern system and you can see that this "Chromatic Aberration" is not a problem. http://www.foveon.net/
While I do not have lots of experience with high end digital cameras I have never seen this fringing on cameras that use beam splitting technology. I suspect you will see that this sort of thing will disappear as chips become better not when we get better lenses. Well this is my rant.

Grant
BH
Beth Haney
Jul 14, 2003
Nancy, this SHOULD be a link to the place on the Olympus site where you can download a variety of manuals for the D-40 Zoom. I don’t get fancy, so… 🙂

< http://www.olympusamerica.com/cpg_section/cpg_download_manua ls.asp>
DH
Dave Hamer
Jul 14, 2003
Nancy

The "Manual"…
Have you tried searching on the internet. I have found quite a few of the more recent manuals are now online as PDF downloads.

Dave
NS
Nancy S
Jul 14, 2003
All of you are just so great for pitching in and going the distance for me, thank you so much.

I have convinced myself that the download/print route for the manual will be a tiny fraction of another search mission at Dad’s timewise. Good idea.

Nancy
P
Phosphor
Jul 14, 2003
Grant – thanks; I was actually aware that it’s not true Chromatic Aberration – but I think that it does it does have something to do with the lens as well as the CCD as fixed focus lenses on digital compacts don’t seem to suffer from it…they have a slightly different issue – blooming in highlights instead of coloured fringes…. (If I want to photoraph branches against a bright sky I’d choose my fixed focus Kodak instead of the G3!)

Susan S.
JF
Jodi Frye
Jul 14, 2003
Susan, I agree. I never have this problem with my mini digi Kodak ! I’m still going to get the FinePix S602 though. Made up my mind that it will be under the X-mas tree along with PS8. Oh, did I tell ya that I plan to win the lottery ? :))

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