Help taking good full tank shots

JGoslee · #1 08/15/2007, 07:23 AM

This is something that I have a lot of problems with. I just can't seem to get a good full tank shot. I can get decent macro pics but the second I back away from the tank all my pics stink! The colors in these pics are terrible. Here's my latest FTS. My camera is a canon xt with the kit lens 18-55mm. I also have the canon 100mm macro lens at my disposal.

Both of these pics were taken with a tripod and a 10 second delay. Also all the pumps were turned off.

gregr · #2 08/15/2007, 09:27 AM

Those pics don't stink- they're real sharp. The exposure is close- maybe a tiny bit too bright but not bad. They're good enough that you could make them excellent in an editing program. Did you take them in RAW mode? Your color issues can be dealt with best on the computer, in the RAW conversion.

JGoslee · #3 08/15/2007, 09:40 AM

Yes I took them in RAW and converted them to jpeg with DXO optics pro.

gregr · #4 08/15/2007, 09:44 AM

What software do you use to edit the pics with?

JGoslee · #5 08/15/2007, 09:50 AM

I only use dxo to edit. The program converts the pics from raw to jpeg and cleans them up a bit automatically. I don't have any other programs.

gregr · #6 08/15/2007, 09:57 AM

You can do a good amount of tweaking with the free program Irfanview. It's a good program. I did some minor adjusting and came up with this:

I don't know if you like this any better but mostly all I did was darken the image. If you had photoshop I'd run you thru the steps but since you don't I'd suggest adjusting the exposure in DXO. I'm not familiar with that program though

edwing206 · #7 08/15/2007, 12:07 PM

The picture looks good, the only thing is that there seems to be a lot of floating particle things. Or am I just going crazy?

4n4sd4 · #8 08/15/2007, 06:09 PM

quite a difference in the color levels though.

JGoslee · #9 08/17/2007, 08:36 AM

Gregr - that looks a lot better. I'm going to take a few pics today and see if I can get the colors to look better.

JGoslee · #10 08/17/2007, 08:37 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by edwing206
The picture looks good, the only thing is that there seems to be a lot of floating particle things. Or am I just going crazy?

Your right about particles in the water. I just did a water change right before I took that pic.

JGoslee · #11 08/18/2007, 05:54 AM

Here's the same pic as above but I chaged the color temp from 7000 to 14000 and I adjusted the exposure.

gregr · #12 08/18/2007, 09:41 AM

Looks a lot better. There might be a very slight green cast to the whole image. Depending on the software you can get rid of it by making a very small adjustment to the hue, or if there are color sliders go from green towards magenta- but just a tiny bit.