The colour yellow

[Wulfys Kingdom]

I took some photos of a few large yellow chrysanthemum flowers but wanted to get more definition into the petals. I'm curious to know whether yellow is a harder colour to process at all? I'm not very experienced in photoshop yet and wasnt sure if this is an easy thing if you know the right techniques, or whether the colour makes it harder or if I need to go back to taking the photo and use a lighting technique?

[Miaow]

I don't think that yellow is a harder colour to process - might depend though with how much light on it though in a way?

[mclean8]

once you get one colour being dominant in an image i think it makes it harder to process. at the least you will have to pay very close attention to the histogram when shooting to make sure you don't blow out one channel first.

try and get some directional light coming from an angle to give me texture to the petals? a big cloudy day will make the slightly curved surfaces evenly lit and not show the subtle detail.

post some examples if you want.

[jev]

It depends on the camera, the color and the colorspace in use. Non-primary colors (as in red, green and blue) often are more difficult to handle in PP. Yellow is just very small in the chromaticity diagrams. Here's what the most usual color spaces look like - as you can see, yellow is small and color space is an important factor. Profoto offers the largest coverage:
rgbS.png

Anyway, the way camera's split colors is also important (check out DxOMark if you want to know the details).

[Wulfys Kingdom]

Thank you everyone for your replies.

Here's one of the photos I took:



I think with the information above and working on using lighting I will be able to achieve a better result.

[mclean8]

yep, i think better light is where to start. a big window to the side, clear out the background of the shot if you can.