Science Fair Experiments

As part of my daughter's science fair project she needs to find someone else

who has done the same experiment and discuss their hypothesis, experimentation

method, results, and conclusions. Her experiment was to see how changing the

color saturation of digital photographs taken of different obejects and

different locations affected the quality of the picture. She and I have both

been searching the internet for another experiment that has been conducted but

with no luck. Time is running short for her to finish her paper. Has anyone

done an experiment like this or know where we can find one? Thanks for any

help you can give!

Probably the easiest/quickest solution to this is to get an independent person to perform analogous steps to what your daughter did, but of course this person must draw their own conclusions. A cousin or similar might be a good starting place for this - family, but still independent. Just a suggestion.

I agree that getting a second or third person to try a series of shots would be a good idea. You can make it a double blind by having one person shoot the series with the saturation changes then giving the results to another, without telling them what it is you are actually looking for - you would need to be able to identify the images for the saturation changes. Or, you could take a series or two, display them randomly to several people and get their impressions.

 

I'm afraid that for the longest time, I've been shooting "RAW" so saturation changes have been later in the process and because I'm usually pretty happy with the results I get, I generally don't change saturation much if at all.

 

When I was shooting with my Fuji S602, I did pretty much consistently use a saturation +1 setting. I'm afraid that coming to that setting wasn't too "scientific." I was on a forum where many of the users discussed their settings and that was kind of an already arrived at consensus and it worked for me too.

 

So I can't really help too much in the direct sense.

 

Some things I would suggest?

 

Be prepared to discuss how using different objects and locations, etc., might add variability to the process. The more variables, the harder to tell what impacts the outcome.

 

The viewing and printing process also adds some variability. If all of the printing and/or viewing isn't done with the same equipment, the equipment or operator differences may change the results. Often, unless you tell them not to, the commercial printing process applies "corrections" and those can make changes that you didn't expect.

 

Some research points? Check some of the sites like Dpreview and Imaging Resource. In conducting camera reviews they may include discussions of the results of in camera processing and sometimes different recommended "settings" like saturation. Similar considerations were/are applied to different color films and comparisons of different Fuji and Kodak color print and slide films also discussed saturation differences. This also can impact the results of "printing" because saturation results needed to be matched corectly, to avoid over-reinforcing or subtracting from the desired results.

 

I'd also suggest being able to discuss what you might want to do differently the next time, what you'd do to approach the same "area" or something that came out of your research or experiment that interests you. Even if things seem to not go well, be able to talk about what you learned. Be able to discuss it as "your" science project, not mom or dad's.

 

One of the things that can be good about your topic is that if you have a public "fair," by having a range of images on your display, viewers can informally follow the process and compare their "results" or preferences to the ones you report on. That's more fun for you and them.