One Red Thread: A Deconstruction
I saw some Abutilon megapotamicum while I was in Florida and was immediately taken by its vibrant color and velvety texture. I took a picture with high hopes. When I got home, though, the original lacked all the lustre of the flowers:
I applied a preset in Lightroom and was amazed by the transformation:
So how did we get from there to here? I assumed that there might have been some trickery with the white balance and/or the camera calibration, but both of those had exactly the same values. So perhaps the contrast was boosted? Nope – actually, it was decreased. Surely the overall color saturation and luminance were increased? Again, no – those were decreased slightly (about 10%). So it MUST be that the reds in the photo had their saturation and luminance increased. I checked the values, and sure enough, the saturation and luminance of only the reds were pushed to the max. So I decreased them back to the values in the original, but the reds still popped:
Interesting! In fact, nearly all the values were the same as the original with two glaring exceptions: the exposure and the “blacks.”
The exposure was at pushed to nearly 1.5 stops greater than the original. If we look at what just that edit does, we get this:
It’s increasing the blacks at this point to a value of about 50 – or half of what Lightroom allows – that takes the photo from an overexposed, uncontrasty mess to vibrant pop:
A few minor tweaks, and we arrive at the final version:
