Sports day reds over blown

[paulefox]

Can anyone help me please

I have been photographing my daughter at her sports day today. It was cloudy so I used Iso 400 Tv mode 1600 speed f4 and the red on her school top looks blown out and blotchy.

What would cause this.

I was using a canond 500D and a 70/200 f4 IS lens.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[DemiLion]

Bold colours, especially red and orange, can cause problems with certain exposures.

The first question is did you shoot in RAW or Jpeg? If it's the former then this should be a non issue, because you can sort it out in processing.

If it's the latter then you may be able to save it, but for future reference you need to look at your camera settings. Have you got the saturation or contrast levels dialled up in your picture style would be my first thought? Alternately, having your WB permanently set on Cloudy can cause problems as well.

You really need to post the image with full Exif intact for a proper diagnosis.

 

[paulefox]

Thanks for your reply. I shoot in RAW I have found that by reducing the saturation of the pictures in Aperture it does take it away but it also makes the colours look dull and effects the rest of the colours too.
I know I could brush it in but it just seems strange that this has happened. I wondered if it could have anything to do with metering.
I will try and upload a pic so you can have a look if I can work out how to do that.

Thanks

 

[Barks]

Hi,

If you have photoshop/adobe camera raw then you can adjust the saturation of each colour group (reds, blues, greens, purples etc) seperately, which would let you desaturate the reds without affecting the other colours.

I know ACR lets you do this, and I'm 90% sure lightroom does too.

Hope that helps.

 

[Barks]

Also, If it's just the reds that seem blown-out then it might be the screen your viewing them on. It might be worth getting one of the photos printed somewhere (one of those kodak self-print kiosk things etc) and see what they print like. They might be more acceptable on paper than on screen.

 

[tdodd]

You may well find that the default processing in Aperture is making the reds appear blown, even though the underlying raw data may well be OK. You could try some highlight recovery, or reduce saturation and/or luminance just of reds. If your white balance has over-compensated for the overcast skies and tried to make it look like a sunny day that might also be the cause of the problem.

I don't have Aperture, but here is a before/after example of reds and yellows appearing to become blown in DPP simply by changing the camera profile used to process the raw data from Neutral to Standard. The raw data is fine. The processing has blown some reds and yellows. If the processing is causing the problem then change the processing.