----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, May 01, 2002 9:34
PM
Subject: Re: [APML] printing LRGB's
Hello,
I am going to go out on a limb
here with something that I chanced upon this morning... I have been trying to
get a really nice output from the CCD LRGB's. (or they could be from photo
origins... it's not going to matter...) The results looked kind of
"plastic"... as in no good.
So the first thing I did was
print a pure RGB... it came out beautiful! You could not tell it came from a
CCD source to save your life. Where was the Luminance messing up the
shot?
It occurred to me that I
should look carefully at the histograms of both... if the histograms are a
graph of the number of pixels occupying a certain value, maybe I could learn
something from this. There it was... the RGB had most of the values nicely
concentrated in the "middle" of the graph, whereas the Luminance went from the
extreme left to the edge of the right. What I think was happening was in the
LRGB combine, there was no color values for parts of the Luminance... so it
came out looking strange. After stretching and compressing the two histograms
to look almost identical, the resulting print looked awesome! In fact, it
looks like something shot with a much larger telescope than 14.5"... there is
now a color value for every value of the Luminance... and the print looks
"real" instead of "plastic"...
I don't know if
there is any merit to this, or if this is a "duh... you didn't know that???"
sort of thing... but it sure helps the quality of the print.
Tony