What is 'color correcting'?

I always get asked this question…

“What do you mean by ‘colour correct’?”

With my photography, I shoot in RAW, which is in essence, a Digital Negative. So just like the film days where you shot film negatives and processed from there, today we shoot in RAW. RAW is as the name suggests, RAW. Everything is unprocessed and has all the colour data there ready to tweak to your needs!

In-camera JPG’s do a fine job, but when you’re working professionally, you need to have control over every image and every scene has its subtle differences.

As an example, I thought I would briefly walk you through a photo I took of my cousin, his wife and his new born son.

I used in camera metering to meter this photo at ISO400, f/3.2, 1/250 shot at 165mm. It’s an ‘ok’ photo as it is, the histogram is showing I have managed to retain more or less all of the tonal detail, and it is ready for processing.

First thing is first!

White Balance… When I shot it, it was set to AutoWB, which chose a WB setting of 4650k. This is fine as it was actually a pretty cloudy day and the looked a bit grey in the scene. However for this photo, the intent was to create a warm autumn feel, hence why I chose the green/brown leaves as a backdrop.

So if I crank up the WB to say 6000k, it adds in more of a yellow tone which pumps up the image a bit more and gives it a very warm feel as opposed to the gloomy grey.

Although the image has all the tonal range, it looks a bit dark, so I would increase my exposure to +0.83 on the exposure slider.



You will see now on her sleeve, we are starting to lose detail as the sun is much harsher on that area than it is anywhere else in the image. Depending on your artistic eye and preference, you could leave it as blown out or recover it with the “Highlight” Slider. As a drastic example, I have reduce Highlights all the way down to -100 to show you can recover most of the detail in the blown out sleeve.



However, doing this flattens out the image a bit, so I will reduce “Highlights”, but not by -100. I have taken it down to -50.



I want to give the image a bit more pump so I will add a bit of contrast to +30, and here is the result of that.

As you can see the image is now looking much more punchy compared to where I first started.

Going back to white balance, as it became more noticeable when I added contrast, their skin tone looked too yellow. So I went back to White Balance to add in a touch of Pink Tint to make the skin look a bit more natural. I have taken it up to +18.

A brought up the Shadows and Blacks a touch and dropped the Whites a little also, added a touch of Clarity for Contrast detail. This is a general practice I do with all my images.

But as you can see from the before/afters, there is a massive change from subtle small tweaks with colour correcting.

This process has to be done with all images that I shoot and this is to ensure consistency throughout.

I hope after reading this it has painted a clearer picture with what is meant by “Colour Correcting” and I hope you feel the extra work involved is worth it for producing better results!

Nokia 1020 (41mp) vs Nikon D800 (36.3mp)

I would first like to start off by saying that this was by no means a scientific test. I just wanted to prove a point that megapixels do not matter.

A friend of mine recently got the new Nokia 1020 phone. This phone is famously sporting a 41mp camera!

If you think about it for second… 41mp! That’s a crazy amount of megapixels, let alone a crazy amount for a mobile phone! The average DSLR nowadays is ranging between 16-24mp on both crop and full frame. The Nikon D800 was making waves when it first came out with its incredible 36.3mp sensor.

I know it’s not a fair comparison and that no-one is really having troubles deciding between the two, but I did want to compare image quality of the Nokia 1020 against the Nikon D800, just for the hell of it!

I have only tested briefly with a random shot in my local town of Wimbledon. I only chose this spot as it was the most well-lit area in my local town.

Because the Nokia does not have any aperture controls and it is a fixed f/2.2, it cannot be a direct comparison once more as my Nikon D800 was fitted with a 24-70mm f/2.8. So I could not close down the Nokia’s aperture, nor open up the Nikon any further. In fact, to match the Nokia’s 1sec exposure as much as possible, I had close down the Nikon to f/3.5, and even at that I found I needed to reduce the exposure in LR a further -0.60 to match.

After white balancing the D800 as close as possible to the Nokia’s files and then matching the 1920x1080 crop, here are the final results.



There is a slight difference in angle as the Nokia was mounted on top of the Nikon D800.

Overall, at a glance, I don’t think many people will notice the difference.

Zoom in 1:1 and you’ll see that the Nikon is much sharper. However when zoomed out to fit the image on screen, I don’t think anyone would be able to separate the two in terms of sharpness.



The key difference between the two images is the Dynamic range. The entrance to the door way to Morrisons on the Nokia is almost completely blown out, whereas the Nikon has still retained some detail.

Likewise for the Christmas lights, as the Nokia has made the lights seem much brighter in comparison.

After pulling all the highlights down, I managed to pull back even more detail from the shop Windows in the D800 file, however the Nokia was just beyond recovery.



That is down to the fact I am working with a D800 Raw file against a Nokia JPG, however as standard, the RAW file is revealing far more detail than the Nokia, and the Nokia is a processed file which naturally should have highlights pulled down and shadows pushed up a bit.

Overall, I am very impressed with the Nokia 1020 and its photography abilities.

Ideally I would like to control its aperture settings so I could do longer exposures, as anything above 1sec was over exposing the image. However if the Nokia 1020 was my mobile phone and I just so happened to be out without my camera, I would be quite happy to whip out this Nokia for some Night Time Cityscapes.

After all, “The best camera is the one you have with you”.