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Different colors - why?


david_simon

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I was photographing this owl on the weekend with my D500 and my 600mm f4. The "Horned-1" shot 's colors are what I saw, a tawny colored owl. I moved over to the left about 5 feet to get a different angle and took the "horned-2_ shot. The color of the owl is almost grey as opposed to tawny. The exposure was not that different. But why the substantial color difference? After the "grey" shot i took some fall foliage and the colors were fine.

 

Horned-1.thumb.jpg.da1592520447e1a237c45ed498cdff54.jpg

 

Horned-2.thumb.jpg.33c572d903ddcb681207d579f684d69b.jpg

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The exposure was not that different. But why the substantial color difference? After the "grey" shot i took some fall foliage and the colors were fine.

Think you forgot that you changed to manual mode and increased some 2 stops of exposure? f/5.6 => 4.0; ISO 1800 =>2200. Hwvr, you increased shutter speed from 1/400s to 1/500s.

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The bright spot of sun on the owl would fool the exposure meter, causing under exposure. Lighting in the second photo was more even, hence better exposed (exposure increased).

 

A lot of green foliage may fool the AWB, but that's easy to fix in post (if you shoot RAW images).

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It's just Auto White Balance doing its thing and trying to render everything as neutral grey.

 

Although your eye and brain compensate for different lighting colour, the camera doesn't do quite as well. The light hitting the owl in those circumstances will be a mixture of blue -from the sky- and green -from the surrounding foliage. This cyan-coloured light will effectively neutralise the dark orange colour of the owl.

 

I suspect this is what it looked like to your eye:

 

IMG_20181016_122138.thumb.jpg.44056087b27708cecbef5c14a0553437.jpg

I just used the curves tool to reduce the blue and boost the red, and to put back a bit of the contrast that was lost by shooting into the light.

 

And the original, for a more side-by-side comparison:

IMG_20181016_123830.thumb.jpg.ed4f5843671d21c55e5c028ecfa8046f.jpg

Edited by rodeo_joe|1
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