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When shooting film, especially slide film, color rendition is a matter of
matching the film's "personality" with the subject at hand.
You can choose films with high or "normal" color saturation, contrast
and color response. These two photos of a colorful Christmas toy soldier in
New York's Rockefeller Center show the differences between saturation
renditions. With a digital camera you can program in color saturation, "warmth"
and even color contrast, making every frame you shoot like an individual selection
of film.

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14 tracks and looking for more, the International Speedway Cooperation (ISC)
has an ace up their sleeve when it comes to photography. Director of photography
Mike Meadows has been their primary go to guy for the past six years when the
shot had to be just right.

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One of the reasons that many people are getting into making prints at home
these days is that inkjet prints are simpler to make and more permanent than,
in many cases, photographic prints (dye based projection, that is.) With recent
advances in ink and paper technology from companies such as Epson and HP we
now see the potential, given proper storage, of digital prints lasting more
than 100 years. Even snapshot size prints, according to Wilhelm Research, from
portable printers like the popular and relatively diminutive PictureMate from
Epson can last three generations or more. And most of the newer printers don't
even require the intermediary of the computer to make very good looking prints.

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The pixels that make up a digital image each have an "address",
a code that defines color, brightness and shades. When we make images with a
digital camera or from film with a scanner we are creating a matrix of pixels
that altogether create the illusion of a continuous tone image. These codes
are not dyes or even densities, but specific information as to how the computer
will interpret the colors and tonal values on the screen. It is only when we
make a print that we leave the "digital" world and enter the world
of dyes and pigments. Because each pixel has a code, basically a bunch of information
that is composed of bits and bytes, we can alter that code to change the "address",
or color and tonal look of every pixel. In this lesson we'll use the Replace
Color dialog box, found in most versions of Photoshop, or under other names
in other programs, to illustrate the point and give you an easy, fun way to
play with your pictures.

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There are times when we have images that are too dark or too light and often
reject them out of hand. But the values only need to be adjusted to bring what
might have sat in shadow into the light. We can do that selectively with certain
tonal areas in the print or globally--that is, on the entire image. This
web how-to covers revealing what might sit in the shadows and deals with a very
simple global adjustment. The work is done here in Photoshop, but many other
image manipulation programs have similar controls.

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There are times when you want your color to exactly match what's in the
scene, but for the most part color is a fairly subjective matter that can be
tweaked with ease in just about any image-editing program. Color has a hue--like
yellow, green or blue--as well as a vividness, which in photography is
often called its saturation. In addition, color can have a cast, which is influenced
by the prevailing lighting conditions when we make the photograph. That cast
can be influenced by the light source itself, such as photographing under direct
sun versus what we'd get when photographing under tungsten lights, and
by the position of the subject in relation to that light source, such as the
difference between photographing in the shade or open light. In addition, color
can also be influenced by the recording medium itself, be it film or digital,
and how the film is made or the digital image processor is programmed to change
the color during the recording processing.

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High scene contrast always creates difficulties for photographers, whether
shooting film or digital. The difficulty stems from the difference between the
ways the film or sensor "sees" and how the human eye sees. Our eyes
are adaptive, and can resolve large variations in brightness by the way it scans
throughout the scene and the amazing reflex of automatically restricting and
dilating the pupil to adjust to bright and dark areas before us. While light
metering systems in cameras are impressive in the way they can read light, the
fact remains that at the moment of exposure the lens on a camera records a scene
at one fixed aperture, or opening. In most situations this is no problem, as
the meter averages light values and the bright and dark areas are distributed
through the recording medium properly. But high contrast presents a problem.

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