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Inspiring and Supporting Photographers of Australian Birds

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Discussions about cameras, lenses, accessories, and image-processing.
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To saturate or not to saturate, that is the question 5 years 4 months ago #1940

  • Ian Wilson
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I just noticed an interesting discussion starting up over at Canon Rumors on the question of saturating stock photos. This helps explain why all the landscapes assaulting my eyes on my Windows 10 screen saver are surreal. I mention this because we are seeing a similar trend in bird photography, especially among professionals. Will be interesting to see the results of the BirdLife comp. I have copied below the opening post to the Canon Rumors thread and a link for anyone wanting to follow this thread.

I'm trying my hand at some stock photography again. My experience with Fotolia wasn't very successful and I'm hoping Adobe Stock will be better. I think I have just made my first mistake. I spent some time today post-processing 20 images and concentrating on keywords. No matter how good a photo is, if no one can find it there won't be any sales, hence the importance of keywords. This evening I looked at some of my competition. That was the mistake - I should have looked first before post-processing and uploading my own images.

Admittedly, the stock images I have looked at are quite catching, but - without exception - they are all saturated to hell. There are blue skies, seas and foliage, the colour of which you never see naturally. The images look like picture postcards, not normal photos. To get the same effect I would have to set my saturation level to 80% plus, in addition to winding up other settings. My post-processing technique has always been to recreate a fairly natural look, but at a quick glance, my natural-looking images look quite dull compared to the massively oversaturated versions.

Any suggestions? Virtually every stock image I have seen is enormously oversaturated, so it looks like the thing to do. Should I just forget trying to achieve a natural look? I can probably replicate the other images, but to me it seems a very unnatural thing to do. Presumably, they are processed this way purely to catch a viewer's attention quickly (so they sell) and looking natural isn't the point. Any general tips for PP for stock? I have very little experience.

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To saturate or not to saturate, that is the question 5 years 4 months ago #1941

  • Bruce Terrill
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Hi Ian,

The only thing that I can suggest is to look at what the 'market' wants, by market I'm talking about magazine sales as I assume this is the target audience.
By looking through the magazines you can see that they seem to like these overly saturated images full of very 'rich' colors. Even desert scenes seem to show colors that aren't real and are overly 'rich'.
I have even been confused in natural surroundings when I have seen a new subject for the first time and it looks dull compared to images that I have studied previously. You also have to take into account that these pictures are printed on glossy paper stock and not the normal flat/matt that you or I would normally use because to us this looks unnatural.
Again, I can only recommend that you prepare your images for your target 'audience', whether publishers/editors/readers, and not what you consider to be a good looking natural image?
HTH mate.

Bruce
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To saturate or not to saturate, that is the question 5 years 4 months ago #1942

  • Ian Wilson
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Thanks Bruce,

I think the horse has well and truly bolted re landscape photography. Not so much in portrait photography where natural skin tones are still valued. My concern is more to do with rendering bird images that can be used for the BLP bird ID gallery. I believe we should try to get the colours of the bird as natural as possible. However, bird comps these days are full of over-saturated images where the photographers are trying to catch the judges' eyes. Some of the worst offenders are the country's top bird photographers and they are followed by a lot of wannabes. I don't think there is much can be done about it, it's like so much else in the world that is fake.

Regards, Ian
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To saturate or not to saturate, that is the question 5 years 4 months ago #1943

  • Bruce Terrill
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I fully agree Ian.
I have tried to keep my own pictures as natural as possible and as such, I have now added a final step to my processing before posting to Flickr.
My last step is now to look at the overall image withing the Saturation sliders and make sure that my images are true to color after all the processing steps, I don't want any of my images showing out of 'true range' colors. I do admit to previously over saturating and over contrasting my images for dramatic effect but always return to natural tones as my preferred option. Although color rendition is a personal choice, if your aim is Natural History then your only options are true to nature colors. . .
You also bring up another important point and I believe that judges should be carefully chosen by the working committee to be able to show knowledge of the subject and not be swayed by any personal preferences toward any artistic genres apart from Natural History.
Bruce

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Last edit: by Bruce Terrill. Reason: additional information

To saturate or not to saturate, that is the question 5 years 4 months ago #1944

  • David Seymour
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Hi Ian,

I've just had a bit of a browse through a few pages of Adobe Stock under the search 'birds flying', and I seem to be seeing quite a proportion of images that show natural-looking colours and saturation, similar in those parameters to many of your images. I would also say the photo standard is far from uniformly high, so while the best ones stand out they can be hard to spot on some pages amongst the dross. Hard to know of course how well the natural-looking images sell in this category, but I get the impression that anyone looking would not necessarily come to the conclusion that an image of this type has to have oversaturated colours to be a top pick in Adobe Stock. Landscape photography is a different matter of course, but I wouldn't be too influenced by what has happened there, when considering bird photography stock. Also, the reasons customers buy bird photography stock may be quite different to why landscape photos are purchased, and for the former it may be that natural-looking colours are more likely to be a requirement. Furthermore, for stock I wouldn't necessarily be influenced by what sometimes happens in the photo competition environment.

Just initial impressions, I'll see if I can come up with some further thoughts,
Cheers, David

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To saturate or not to saturate, that is the question 5 years 4 months ago #1945

  • David Seymour
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Just a few thoughts on the landscape photography side of the discussion. In my view landscape photography has had a long history of being heavily influenced by the medium and by manipulation of the latter. In the days of black and white film, the medium generally didn't influence results too much to start with (although colour filters were often used to darken skies etc.). But then enthusiasts started mucking around with different film developers to get different looks, and finally Ansell Adams came along with his zone system in which he often wasn't necessarily trying to reproduce the subject faithfully, but rather used a variety of tools in film and print development to get a precisely calibrated look to the final print - some of his most famous images of Half Dome in Yosemite Valley had almost black skies in the print. Later, with colour transparency film we initially had Kodachrome, which produced a reasonably accurate final image on a sunny day, but on an overcast or showery day, quite frankly produced an undersaturated bluish result which often didn't do justice to the colours one had seen with the naked eye. Then came Fujichrome Velvia, a very saturated film which was the mainstay of professional landscape photographers for a decade or more, and which was sometimes over the top in sunny conditions or sunsets/sunrises but much more near accuracy on a wet cloudy day. It was from that background wih Velvia that many photographers first used digital cameras on landscapes, and after finding the ex-camera results didn't have anything like the Velvia 'look', they learnt how to use the RAW conversion software to 'correct' the difference. I think this legacy from the saturated film stocks may still be hanging around to some extent in landscape photography, perhaps reinforced by the stock agencies and magazines etc. which would have felt a need to maintain consistency in the photographic 'look' after digital arrived.

I have my doubts whether the evolution of avian photography has followed exactly the same path, though there are some parallels. I seem to remember that Fujichrome Velvia wasn't always favoured for wildlife, including avian, because it was generally acknowledged that the film was not designed to be colour-precise. You may have found avian photographers more likely using Kodachrome or Ektachrome, the latter being more accurate in overcast conditions than the former (and quicker to get developed). In digital, I get the impression that the oversaturation tendency in processing is not as widespread as seems to have become the case in landscapes (and I have to admit I have to fight the tendency myself - I was a long-time Velvia user in landscape photography). I agree with Ian that processing for submissions to the BLP galleries should aim to have colours as accurate and natural as possible. Mind you, sometimes you get a surprise with some species - I have some recent photos of an Eastern Rosella that look quite oversaturated in the RAW straight out of the camera; put these next to other recent processed images I've produced from other species, and the latter images look a bit flat by comparison.

Cheers, David
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