Tulip Festival 3 (and a new Gallery and comments on fringing and halos)

To view the gallery of these photographs please click on: Tulips

There are a lot of technical explanations you can read about chromatic aberration –CA- color fringing – green or purple fringing around the edges of a photograph and how to fix it in various software packages. Essentially CA is a result of how color and light are handled by the lens and it can happen with the most expensive of lenses. New coatings and in-camera software are reducing this phenomenon but it is unlikely to go away completely. Many software packages have tools to defeat CA and you can always paint/clone or heal it away. It’s a good idea to look out for it and fix it especially if you will make a larger version of your photograph.

Halos are very similar to CA, a sort of ghosting along the edges of some objects. This occurs with overdone sharpening and when some other post processing is taken too far. But we also get halos in nature because of light catching or passing through some of the floral backgrounds close to the edges of our subjects, like tulips planted close together. Painting this away in post-processing is one method; fading it, using the fixes for chromatic aberration may also help. In the two galleries of tulips that I have posted, I had to work on this in a few of the photographs and it took some effort to reduce the effect. This type of haloing is a natural phenomenon with vibrant coloured flowers and great light. It can be quite evident when the photograph is looked at closely. More than likely in postings on this blog it is invisible. It may not be so invisible in the SmugMug galleries given the higher resolution and larger size of the photographs. It’s worth looking closely at your photographs before publishing to the web or printing to ensure these kinds of issues, if serious, are reduced to near invisibility as they will catch the eye of your viewer.

One of the reasons I take so long to post my photos is the work I put into post processing; subtle though that processing may be, the object is to reduce technical problems and keep my audience’s eye on the subject. Two examples of CA and haloing (both are present) are below, enlarged and to a degree exaggerated so it will be evident on the web.