1706 - Tell You A Secret


Let me tell you a secret that I learned from Dan Margulis book “Photoshop LAB Color: The Canyon Conundrum and Other Adventures in the Most Powerful Colorspace”:

Grass is not green, grass is yellow!

At least, from a spectral point of view it’s more yellow than green. On the other hand, green grass is a cliché and that’s the reason why the manufacturers of compact cameras over-emphasize green. Unfortunately the Panasonic DMC-LX5 is no exception. Dan Margulis has his own tricks to cope with that, and in fact there are many ways you can choose.

For me, a simple “Selective Color” layer in Photoshop normally does the trick: I select “yellow” and in that range I shift the green/magenta balance towards magenta. When the layer is set to “relative” (instead of “absolute”), a value of 10, sometimes even up to 20 suffices. You can do the same to the “green” range, but for the sake of color depth it is often better to keep the greens, uhhh, green.

In this image the case is more complicated though. It’s a combination of two variants from the same RAW, developed with different color temperatures, global saturation and selective desaturation of certain colors, an exposure layer on the bottom and a number of things that I forgot to mention. Oh yes, and a polarizer and a split-ND filter to begin with 🙂

The Song of the Day is “Tell You A Secret” from the 2000 album “Groovin” by Bill Wyman’s Rhythm Kings. That Bill Wyman, yes. See a live performance on YouTube.


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