Attention Kenny - Macro Photography help

[athenaworth]

I love that you still only use iPhoto. I've tried using it to freshen up my ruby pics (I can't seem to stop them from having a purple tint that isn't there IRL).

Do you ever use lens filters? Off topic, but I took a bunch of pictures of my friend's commitment ceremony and they're all super yellow because the walls were yellow. Would a lens filter have helped? I didn't want to use flash.

 

[kenny]

I love that you still only use iPhoto. I've tried using it to freshen up my ruby pics (I can't seem to stop them from having a purple tint that isn't there IRL).

Do you ever use lens filters? Off topic, but I took a bunch of pictures of my friend's commitment ceremony and they're all super yellow because the walls were yellow. Would a lens filter have helped? I didn't want to use flash.

There might have been two problems, yellow walls and the camera not white balanced for the light source used.
For instance if the camera was white balanced for daylight but you were in a room with old fashioned lightbulbs the pics will look yellow even with white walls.

Assuming white balance was correct and all those yellow walls caused the light in the room to have a yellow tint then the pictures are telling the truth about what it looked like.
The human present in the room has a complex eye/brain system that cancels out prevailing colors so you don't notice them.
Cameras just tell the truth.

But if you want "correct" skin tones in a yellow room I'd experiment with manual white balance this way...
Normally you'd hold up white paper that is out of focus and filling up the view, then press your camera's manual white balance button, if your camera offers this feature. (This is how pros precision white-balance.)

But for the yellow-wall room I'd experiment.
I'd tape the white paper onto a yellow wall and when pressing the button I'd have the yellow wall occupy maybe 25% of the field of view.
Then take some pics and see if skin tone still looks yellow.
If so redo the white balance with 50% yellow wall and 50% white paper, etc.

A filter would theoretically work but finding just the right complimentary hue would be hard, and I'd not bother since clever white balancing should work.
I don't use filters, but may some day since they can do some cool things.

 

[kenny]

Amazing, just amazing. Kenny, you've just proved what a labor of love it is. You lost me at Q-tips for cleaning off the gems It is why you are good at what you do and why your photos are works of art.

Thanks Mino.
There's no magic
Anyone could do it with the right gear, patience, and an open mind for solving problems.

 

[kroshka]

Oh Kenny thank you for your help! That lovely inclusion area around 3:00 is a very interesting inclusion - I need to take a look at the report again but I believe that may be the etch channel and up close on a microscope it looks pretty neat. I would love to be able to get a good clear macro photograph of that, but not sure if that is possible? I have a lot of learning and practice to do that's for sure, so hopefully in the coming months I will make you proud. I need to go and buy a mini HDMI cable so I can hook the camera up to a monitor, I think that will make it easier to see how the focus is, etc. To answer your question about the specs - the stone is a 0.40 fancy green SI2. Of course it would have been nice if the stone were a better clarity, however, for the size, color and price, I couldn't say no The shape is also interesting, I haven't seen many squarish stones that look like this one.

kroshka

After I brightened it up I noticed what looked like a Q-Tip hair or lint on top of the black carbon inclusion around 3:00.

I retouched that out.

One bad thing about good equipment is it makes dust VERY noticeable.
You can clean the FCDs better or retouch later.

I clean by soaking in Isopropyl alcohol then using several Q-Tips to dry each FCD.
Then a quick blow with a camera lens blower may get the last of the dust.

 

[kroshka]

I'm sure as I take more shots and learn to adjust stuff better I will have more questions for you - so glad I have someone to guide me To answer your question about PC or Mac, I have both - as to how well versed I am on using either, that's another story..... As for post processing, I did not do any on the photo I posted, nor have I played around with doing any post processing yet other than sizing and cropping so I could post it here.

kroshka

Your camera gives you the option of shooting in these modes:
JPEG BASIC
JPEG FINE
JPEG NORMAL
RAW

Always shoot in RAW.
Unlike JPEG, RAW is not compressed so RAW captures more detail in the shadows and highlights that you can recover in post.

Later in post you can save copies in JPEG, or better yet PNG, for uploading to PS or sending to friends since the RAW files are huge and cannot be opened by the software that many people have.

Do you have a PC or a Mac?
Which software, if any, do you use now for post?

Very often serious photographers buy two softwares, one like Photoshop and another for handing and organized the many files you eventually build up.
For the later the most popular is Adobe Lightroom.