Zebras

[derekfountain]

So, what colours are zebras then? Here's an image I took at the local zoo yesterday. This is the result of my RAW conversion.

It's quite an easy one to adjust in CurveMeister - no trouble finding lights, darks and neutrals here - but it's got lots of mixed light in there! It's interesting in that tweaking things so the stripes are black and white makes it look very cold and, to my eye, totally weird. My best effort, which came via HSB mode, has the hue clock telling me that the black stripes are actually rather red, and the white stripes are rather blue. My monitor is calibrated with a Spyder, BTW.

I'm interested to see what other people come up with. Can people make it look right when the stripes are black and white?

[ggroess]

before i try this...

http://www.allposters.com/-sp/National-Park-of-Serengeti-Tanzania-Posters_i1369934_.htm

Greg

[-default]

A bit of brown (aka dark orange) is fine, but I think the whole image had an orange cast, and an overall lack of contrast.  There were also some areas of cyan shadows as Derek mentioned in the lighter stripes.

I did two corrections.  The first in wgCMYK, since the K channel gives so much control over the stripes, and it's relatively easy in that color space to remove color casts separately from shadow and highlight.

The next image is a second pass in Lab, where I added contrast to the colt.  Although I also bumped the colors, this did not make much difference for this image, other than to bring out an orange glow on the colt's mane that I decided looked interesting enough to leave in place.

Still room for improvement - for example there is a blue sheen to some of the mare's darker stripes, just above the colt's head that I don't like.