Eastern Railroad Discussion > The fogs of fall and the mysteries of digital

One of my favorite things to do on my morning commute is stop for a coffee at a convenience store, and then sip on it slowly as I head down into the valley of the Normanskill. There's a siding on the NS former D&H mainline that runs from Delanson to Esperance, NY, with a pair of midpoint signals at Gage Road. It's a popular spot for meets in the early AM.

This time of year, with warm humid days and cool clear nights, the valley is chock full of fog almost every day. I kinda like that, a gentle reminder that as the trees just start to change, much cooler conditions are right around the corner. (We need that reminder right now, since it hit 85-90 degrees repeatedly over the weekend.)

And this brings me to one of my few reservations about digital photography. Back in my Kodachrome and Fujichrome days, I knew exactly how to expose the film to capture the essence of the fog, and the train looming out of it. Nowadays, it seems like both my camera and my software (PS Elements 8) are conspiring to clarify every photo, and thus defeat the moody sense of fog that I'm looking for.

I do appreciate the ability to pull a sharper image out of, for example, a hot, steamy summer day. But sometimes I WANT the murk, and I can't figure out how to capture it, and how to keep the software from killing it. Is there a "fog" function in Elements that I should be using?

And one last mystery: On sunny days, my Canon 50D's sensor consistently registers the red LED signals at this location as a kind of yellowish orange, so much so that when the signals are set up yellow over red, you often can't tell the two colors from one another without a careful look. But in the fog, the reds look red, to my eye anyway. What's up with that?

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Are you shooting RAW files?

Shooting them, but rarely using them. These are all off of the high res jpegs, but I have the .RAWs archived.

Maybe you could mess with the RAWs and get what you want. More room to play in that format.

I often have trouble getting the LED signals, especially red, to register correctly in digital. I have found that it seems to be very dependent on the angle to the signal. I assume it has to do with the nature of LED lights and how they interact with the sensor.

Is this problem with LEDs specific to Canon cameras? I've seen some discussion on the subject of bad reproduction of red highlights on the camera review web sites.

Any Nikon folks around here care to weigh in?

march_hare Wrote:
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> Is this problem with LEDs specific to Canon
> cameras? I've seen some discussion on the subject
> of bad reproduction of red highlights on the
> camera review web sites.
>
> Any Nikon folks around here care to weigh in?

I have the same red signal issue with my Nikon D80. Of course it's a ten-year old camera and I don't know if the new cameras have the same issue.

Those shots look murky to me...I think digital should be giving you a more accurate representation of the scene than film would have. Maybe your sharpening needs a tweak? Camera set to over-expose slightly?
Regarding the red of the LEDs - are you using any filters?

Original scene was almost a white sky, with the sun visible only as a bright disk.

First shot captured that reasonably well on the camera screen, but the fog effect was greatly reduced when brought into PS Elements. Even before I did anything, the change from the camera screen was quite noticeable.

Second shot is at a different zoom setting, and the bluish sky is a total invention. There was no blue visible at the time I popped the shutter. Again, this became much more noticeable when I loaded into PSE and the minute I touched any of the standard enhancement controls (auto levels, or adjust smart fix) it launched an attempt to make that a blue sky no matter what.

Going away shot is a little better, I metered off the sky in hopes of darkening it enough to see the disk of the sun through the fog, but no dice.

It's frustrating, in that I've been shooting digital for 10 years now and in a situation like this I really would prefer film, just because I know how it works and how to control it.

I wonder if its a PSElements issue then...

The more I take digital pictures, the less I know...

That being said, here's 3 thoughts -

1. Your camera's Average White Balance function may be changing the AWB picture-by-picture, based on the scene.

2. I've found I definitely have to expose for the highlights in digital, and then bring up the shadows in post-processing. Otherwise, there's too much blow-out.

3. LED signals have exceedingly bright point sources, and the sensor's dynamic range on my camera can't handle it. If I can't live with the "orange" that red turns into, I have to edit the signal pixels (the human eye has a tremendous dynamic range, which is why this is not a problem for our vision).

Ray



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/26/17 14:25 by Ray_Murphy.

Hello march_hare,
I use Exrite Color Checker Passport ( http://www.xritephoto.com/#display-calibration). I have used it to set up two custom W/B settings for quite sometime. One for sun and one for clouds. Another feature is to setup a custom plug-in for your specific camera. I have used it on a Nikon D300 and currently on my D750. I use Lightroom 6 for 98% of my editing. With the included software it is pretty straightforward to use. What I did was take a picture of the included gray card to setup a custom W/B for sun and clouds. I then take a picture of a bunch of colored squares (included also) in sun and clouds. This sets up a custom color plug-in in Lightroom for my D750. I take my pictures in RAW and import them into Lightroom. In develop mode under camera calibration I have a selections for my D750 for sun and clouds. The color checker passport is made of plastic and about the size of a wallet and you flip to whatever pane you need.

Now shooting in my custom W/B and then selecting the drop down option in develop mode in Lightroom for my camera model makes it so easy. You can see that orange tint of signals go to red when I select the appropriate option. I used to be always fussing with color balance to get it close to what I actually saw. Now with Passport that is a distant memory for me and a great time saver. Not sure what the software does but it does give me true colors. Not a dramatic change but enough that you can see the difference for the better.

Hopefully I made it somewhat easy to get my point across.

Regards, John M Breitigan
Washington, PA.