Azalea picture came out horrible...why?

<p>I spent a couple hours shooting flower pictures today, and most came out great. My Azalea pictures, however, look terrible. They came out neon, with a complete loss of detail. I'm shooting with a Nikon D60 and Sigma 18-200 lens.<br /><br />I'm wondering if the paper-thin quality of Azaleas is letting too much light through the petals, and there's a special technique I need to practice when shooting them? Any ideas?<br /><br />Thanks in advance for you help!</p><div></div>

<p>Wow, those are pink! While I usually use my camera on bright for flowers, for these if you have it on bright, you might want to go down to natural. Also, you should be able to fix it a bit in photoshop. After taking a flower class at <a href="http://www.ppsop.com">www.ppsop.com</a> (if you are really into flowers, you might want to check that out), I learned it's usually better just to work with one flower, unless you have like a field of something like tulips. Try concentrating on one flower, and I think you will be able to get more detail on it.</p>

<p>Are you shooting RAW? If not, do so and adjust the color in post-processing. Are you taking a white point? You have to do that with Nikons if you want accurate color.</p>

<p>Common problem with red (and yellow) flowers when a digital camera is used. Have a look at the histogram and you will see that the red channel is clipped (overexposed). Sensors are very sensitive in the red and it is very easy to blow that channel. I took the image into PS and came up with this - if you shot this in RAW you should be able to do even better.</p>

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<p>I usually shoot RAW, although today I decided to stick with JPG to keep my post-production work down. Won't do that again.<br />I just had my white balance set to Auto because I find that usually works well when shooting outdoors. <br />I noticed when I first got my Nikon about a year ago that my pictures were coming out incredibly over-saturated, so I have been shooting for quite a while with my camera's saturation setting at Moderate (negative) instead of Normal (zero). I can't even imagine what the Enhanced (positive) saturation setting would do. This 'moderate' saturation setting has been a great adjustment for the most part. Believe it or not, this particular photo was also taken on that setting.</p>

<p>I was going to suggest shooting RAW + JPEG, but since your have a Nikon D60, when you capture both RAW and JPEG, the type of JPEG is restricted to JPEG basic. That is not a good solution either. I would stick with RAW; you can always use some software to convert your Nikon NEF files into JPEG afterwards. For example, NikonView NX is a free software from Nikon, and that can perform auto batch JPEG conversion.</p>

<p>Dieter, funny that you mentioned the yellows also have a tendency to get a little wild. I shot several different colored Irises. They all came out beautiful (again, my camera was set to slightly desaturate), but of course the yellow and red one is a bit too vivid, to the point where I think too much detail was lost in the yellow petals.</p>

<p>Yellow iris...</p><div></div>

<p>In addition to shooting RAW, I always underexpose at least a third of a stop. This contributes to keeping the whites from blowing out most of the time. With colors that intense and post production in Photoshop, Lightroom or Aperture so feature laden, I can't imagine risking my brights in pursuit of perfect in-camera exposure.</p>

<p>That's a helluva iris, by the way. I wonder whether it comes in rose, lilac or purple! A real beauty.</p>

<p>Renee, EXIF says this was shot with saturation set at normal.</p>

<p>Dieter has the right answer. The color of many orange, red, yellow, etc. flowers will blow out the red channel even though the overall exposure looks good. If your camera can display the histograms for the individual color channels you will see this at the time of exposure - this display mode is your friend when shooting such subjects.</p>

<p>As Emily points out, you'll find that you need to decrease exposure to compensate. Use the red channel histogram display as your guide. As others point out, you'll have more leeway, both to recover slightly a slightly hot red channel and to bring back shadow detail from the underexposure.</p>

<p>Dan</p>

<p>Another method is shooting when sunlight conditions are better. Photography is light. I tend to only shoot images of flowers in the morning between 7:00 AM and 9:00 AM when the sun is at the horizon and the sun light lightly scattered by the atmosphere. I've always found shooting on a cloudy day or in bright sunlight very difficult. You may still have to use some of the techniques mentioned above but the final image will be improved.</p>

<p>This happens to me with my P&S. The best way I have found to deal with it is to use the EV adjustment to deliberately underexpose the whole picture. You can spot the problem on the LCD screen on your camera by suspecting all brightly lit magenta flowers are going to be a problem and then look at the highlights. When they look flat and burned out you know you have to pull back the exposure.</p>

<p>The OP's image was not only shot shot in JPEG (which is by definition 8-bits per channel), but was also in sRGB colorspace, which radically compressed the available colors, resulting in loss of subtle color and tonal separation. It's like using the 8 crayon box when you could be using the 128 crayon box.</p>