Red

Whether it is a dramatic sunrise/sunset or a beautiful red flower, the color red is a challenging color to photograph. Why? In today’s digital photography world, most pros have taught you to push your histogram to the right edge without touching it and using your highlight alert indicator to show that you have no/very few blown highlights (aka blinkies). I teach this all the time on my workshops but did you ever take a picture with a lot of red, orange, or yellow in it and the color looked horrible even though your combined histogram looked perfect? We all have… and I really don’t have the answer as to why but I do have the solution for you. When photographing very vivid reds, oranges, and yellows, make sure you activate and check your RGB histogram. You will often see in these situations that your combined histogram looks perfect but the red (or sometimes the green) channel is clipped. Solution….underexpose until the channel is not clipping. Someone once tried to explain to me why this happens to the combined histogram but all I heard was the whah, whah, whah, whah, whah, whah Charlie Brown adult talk, In my opinion that shouldn’t happen but at least now you know the solution!