How to handle dayglow colours on cars ?

[JohnStewart]

One of the cars in the Time Attack series has some new dayglow orange paintwork around the wheel arches and the rear of the car. The car itself is predominantly matt black.

Even shooting in RAW, the orange seems to get completely blown and ends up looking nothing like it does in reality, and varies from a pinkish red to an out of focus looking orange.

Hopefully you can see the problem here:

I tried a CPL which seemed to help with the colour uniformity and it more closely resmbles the "real" colour, but you still seem to lose any detail. For example, there are black sponsorship letters on the windscreen pillars that are very clear to the naked eye, but barely visible in the image and impossible to read.

Does anyone else have the same issues, and how do you deal with them?

John

 

[Russ77]

IMO they look like cracking shots!! Good sense of speed, focus looks spot on and exposure looks OK.

Are you being a little over-critical of your own work because you know what it *should* look like, i.e. the writing down the a-pillar?

Have you tried running them through photoshop and doing a channel colour adjustment? It's not something I've dont myself but I'm sure I've read that you can create a mask/layer and tone down individual colour channels so you could reduce the orange without changing the appearence of the rest of the image.

It might just be "one of those things" where due to the extreme nature of the colour, cameras will just really struggle to render it?

 

[swanseamale47]

fluorescent paint glows under UV, I suspect the camera is filtering out much of the uv or the sensor simply isn't overly uv sensitive, you could select just the orange in hue/saturation and ajust that nearer the correct colour.

 

[dunganick]

Your doing fine in those images to be honest.

Personally i find 2 things with day glow colours. 1 they usually have a matt or satin texture and as such they tend to haze as opposed to have nice clear sharp reflections (see the matt black on the rear quarter of your shot)

Secondly, they are often on black cars and this (depending on your metering mode) may well cause over exposure.

The way i deal with it is this.

1. Dont shoot day glow cars (i find this one works the best)

2. underexpose a few points and bring back the fill + contrast in PP

One of the teams i shoot often has had a matt black car with orange and has now switched to matt back with lime green. Its a right pain to catch correctly.

Based on your above efforts, as long as they didn't take too long to process - just do that!

 

[hairboy]

One thing you can try is turn down Luminosity down in your RAW editor and/or open up Photoshop, and tweak curve/level in individual channels?

Metallic nature of the cars mean it's very specular, giving you different saturation level depending on the angle of light and the exposure level, so what looks like "correct" colour from 1 angle will differ to another angle. No real way of "dealing" with it. You are simply capturing that lighting condition. For colour accuracy, I assume you set custom WB at the start of the shoot?

By the way, CPL will not polarise off metallic surface. All you are doing is underexposing it by however much you rotate it. perhaps that's one reason for the specular highlights blowing. It's marginally overexposed, and by underexposing with CPL, it is bringing it back within the threshold. it does a job at clearing up reflection of glass though, so would make a more pleasant shot including the cockpit if that's what you are after.

HTH

 

[JohnStewart]

Thanks for the feedback and suggestions - very much appreciated. I'm glad I'm not the only one who experiences similar issues.

I don't have photoshop, only Lightroom, so the above images have had no more than about 10 - 20 seconds tweaking with the basic sliders. The WB hasn't been changed in the above shots - still set to auto. I generally only play around with WB for prints or hi-res work. Will have another go this evening with individual colour channels and see if I can improve it any.

I'll also try underexposing some during the next round and playing around more in PP.

John

 

[Russ77]

Thanks for the feedback and suggestions - very much appreciated. I'm glad I'm not the only one who experiences similar issues.

I don't have photoshop, only Lightroom, so the above images have had no more than about 10 - 20 seconds tweaking with the basic sliders. The WB hasn't been changed in the above shots - still set to auto. I generally only play around with WB for prints or hi-res work. Will have another go this evening with individual colour channels and see if I can improve it any.

I'll also try underexposing some during the next round and playing around more in PP.

John

Just a quick thought....... In light room you have the adjustment brush so it might be worth brushing over the orange and "playing" with the sliders to see if that improves the appearence.

 

[JohnStewart]

Just a quick thought....... In light room you have the adjustment brush so it might be worth brushing over the orange and "playing" with the sliders to see if that improves the appearence.

Thanks, will give that a try as well

 

[JohnStewart]

I had a quick try last night with only moderate success. It seems there's not much detail to be recovered from the blown areas. Changing the individual colour sliders has a slightly beneficial effect, but due to the colour changing across the car, it gaves some parts an un-natural hue. I did try the adjustment brush as well (first time for me using that tool) to drop the exposure on the highlighted areas, but again the finished result looked a bit odd.

It does seem like a lot of work for not much benefit, so think I'll just live with it in the future, and try the underexposing in camera next time

John

 

[Russ77]

I had a quick try last night with only moderate success. It seems there's not much detail to be recovered from the blown areas. Changing the individual colour sliders has a slightly beneficial effect, but due to the colour changing across the car, it gaves some parts an un-natural hue. I did try the adjustment brush as well (first time for me using that tool) to drop the exposure on the highlighted areas, but again the finished result looked a bit odd.

It does seem like a lot of work for not much benefit, so think I'll just live with it in the future, and try the underexposing in camera next time

John

I must admit I had a very quick try with one of your pictures and concluded pretty much the same as you :shake:

As you said, experiment with the exposure and I'm sure you'll find a happy medium eventually

 

[tdodd]

I don't have photoshop, only Lightroom, so the above images have had no more than about 10 - 20 seconds tweaking with the basic sliders.

Here's one of mine, shot raw and fixed in Lightroom by setting Highlight Recovery to +70 and tweaked just a fraction more (to compensate for reduced contrast fro shooting through fencing) by increasing black level to +10....

According to Lightroom the paintwork was not clipped. You'll see the specular highlights being clipped in the original on the headlight, but nowhere else. Even so, Highlight Recovery seemed to do the trick. In fact, setting it to +70 might be slight overkill, but it illustrates the potential, I think.