Using the Singh-Ray Gold-N-Blue Polarizer

Happy New Year to all!

Before getting to the “meat” of this article on using the Sing-Ray the Gold-N-Blue polarizer, let me give you a quick update on my new Canon EOS 5D MkII camera. I’m mid-way through my 2008 Holiday break – a full two weeks off work, and it feels great! I was supposed to be spending a lot of time outdoors, enjoying my new Canon EOS 5D MkII camera, snowshoeing and cross-country skiing…

Alas, the weather has been most uncooperative, with lots of rain and freezing rain over the beautiful snow, cloudy skies, very high winds (blowing at 100km/h as I’m writing this on December 28th, 2008), slippery and icy conditions, etc… [sigh]… I did go out a whole three times to enjoy my new camera, but 95% of the images I’ve taken with it so far were indoor “test” shots. I am absolutely thrilled with the image quality of this camera. The 5D MkII is everything I was hoping it would be, so let me share a couple of shots:  

Snow Covered Trees in Winter
Canon EOS 5D MkII with Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM lens at 47mm
1/25s at f/14, ISO 100
B+W Polarizer
Gitzo G1340 tripod, Really Right Stuff BH-55 ballhead, cable release, mirror lock-up

Gryphon
Canon EOS 5D MkII with Canon EF 70-200mm f/4 L IS USM lens at 81mm
1/50s at f/5.6, ISO 1600(!)
Gitzo GT3541LS tripod, Really Right Stuff BH-55 ballhead

To make the best of the disappointing weather, I’ve been keeping busy indoors, working on image submissions, web pages, etc… As Gustav mentioned in the previous blog entry, writing these blog posts are a lot of fun, particularly when we get feedback from you. So I’m taking this opportunity to write a blog entry on how to use a wonderful filter that I picked up last spring, the Singh-Ray Gold-N-Blue polarizer.

A “normal” polarizer eliminates reflections caused by water, moisture, glass, metal, etc… So, instead of having a harsh reflection from these surfaces, the “true” color can be seen. This is why a polarizer can turn a white-ish-blue sky a dark blue while making the white clouds “pop”, will let you see through water’s surface, will remove the highlights and glare from damp foliage or wet rocks, etc… Using the polarizer gives the impression of increasing color saturation, darkening and deepening colors, and increasing contrast. Without a doubt, a polarizing filter is the most useful filter a nature photographer can own. By turning the polarizer filter, the amount of polarization changes, letting you control the amount of the polarization effect. This filter is invaluable in so many situations, and quite frankly, I almost never take a landscape shot without one – just take a look at all of the other images I’ve posted on my blog… Heck, I’m even using a polarizer when I’m shooting frogs! (See my blog entry “Summer 2008“)

A “gold and blue” polarizer is a completely different beast… Instead of removing the polarized light, thereby eliminating reflections, a gold and blue polarizer will change these reflections to either gold or deep blue. The color of the polarization is controlled by rotating the filter, going from full gold polarization to light gold polarization to light blue polarization to full blue polarization to light blue polarization, etc… So a Gold-N-Blue polarizer does not relpace the use of a regular polarizer – it is used for a different purpose, and that’s to add gold or blue colors… The filter cannot be used in all situations; For example, when it is used on a blue sky, the blue polarization will turn the sky a weird and artificial looking deep denim blue, whereas the gold polarization will turn it pale yellow. Yuck.

Using this polarizer effectively, and producing good looking images is not so simple… There are two problems to overcome: it is easy to “overdo” the effect, and the filter itself is magenta, giving quite a pink cast to the image and making your camera’s white balance setting go haywire. For the first problem, well, you’ll just have to play around with it – it’s really a self-learning thing. Just remember that a little goes a long way, and more often than not, using full polarization (either blue or gold) may be too much.

I need to give credit to Darwin Wiggett, who wrote a very helpful post on the usage of this filter on the Singh-Ray blog site: Getting “what you see” with the Gold-N-Blue – this article is really what got me learning. While you’re there, I highly recommend that you read some of the other great articles related to the usage of filters on the Singh-Ray Blog.

Let’s start by looking at two different images of the same subject (albeit different compositions), one taken with my Hoya Moose polarizer (a “normal” polarizer), and the other with the Singh-Ray Gold-N-Blue polarizer.

Moss Glenn Falls at Granville, Vermont
Canon EOS 20D with Canon EF 17-40mm f/4 IS USM lens at 25mm
1.6s at f/16, ISO 100
Hoya Moose Polarizer
Gitzo G2220 tripod, Really Right Stuff BH-55 ballhead, cable release, mirror lockup

Moss Glenn Falls at Granville, Vermont
Canon EOS 20D with Canon EF 17-40mm f/4 IS USM lens at 22mm
3.2s at f/16, ISO 100
Singh-Ray Gold-N-Blue Polarizer (full gold polarization)
Gitzo G2220 tripod, Really Right Stuff BH-55 ballhead, cable release, mirror lockup

Compare the two images… Whether you prefer one or the other is a matter of personal taste – both are nice. On the first image, there is no “glare” off the wets rocks. Rather, they just look wet and dark. Without a polarizer, they would have been unpleasantly shiny. On the 2nd image, the rocks are… gold! I’m rich! I’m rich! Well, not really – this is just the polarizer doing it’s thing: rather than eliminating the wet shine, the reflections are now golden. But getting this image to “look right” is not simple. Let’s use another image as an exampled, going through multiple RAW conversions (using Adobe Camera Raw) to explain how to do it right.

Without the Gold-N-Blue polarizer, my camera would have selected an “auto white balance” that would have been very good. However, you can see how magenta the image is using the camera’s “Auto” white balance setting… The results are similar in Adobe Camera Raw’s “Auto” (as opposed to “As Shot”) white balance mode:

ACR RAW conversion using camera’s “Auto” white balance setting

Eeeeeee-yuck! The filter’s magenta cast really shows through in this image. Searching on the web, you’ll find many pictures from a multitude of photographers who just left this type of image as is, thumping their chest with pride at their beautiful “golden pink” image. Not me, nope, no way… No siiirrrr-eeee!

The first way one would typically try to correct the white balance of this image is to use the “white balance eye dropper” on the white water. Make the water white, and you figure that all else would fall into place… Here we go: by clicking on the white water, ACR reports a temperature of of 3700K, and a green-magenta tint of -59.

ACR RAW conversion using the white balance eye-dropper on the white water

Well this is certainly much better… but… Notice how yellow the greens on the left are? Notice how grey-looking the water is? Somehow, this does not quite work. To correct this, I tried white-balancing off the rocks that were, in fact, quite neutral grey. This time, ACR shows me a temperature of 3200K and a tint of -42. I’ve added a round cyan spot about where I clicked for the white balance.

ACR RAW conversion using the white balance eye-dropper on the rocks

We’re getting close! Looking at the water color, I’m getting RGB readings where the red are a couple of points higher than green, but the blue channel is some 15 points above red & green…. So, it’d be good to reduce the red a bit, but I really don’t mind getting more blue in the water’s color – this will be interpreted by us humans as being cold water. And I assure you, as per my wet feet with numb and cramping toes that the water was very cold. By manually tweaking the temperature to 3300K and the tint to -29, we get the following:

ACR RAW conversion using the white balance eye-dropper on the rocks

OK, so there’s not a huge difference between the two images, but there is a difference… We’re almost there. Looking at the above image, Gustav made me notice that where the gold polarization is at its strongest (in the blue square), the “gold” definitely has a green tinge to it… I presume this may be due to the high green-magenta tint correction of -29? I don’t know, but I do know that I did not like that greenish gold. This problem is not overly noticeable in this image, but on other images where the gold effect was much stronger, this greenish tint was definitely getting ugly. Correcting this is very simple – either in ACR or in Photoshop, change the Hue value for “Yellow” to somewhere between -25 and -15, which will make the yellows “redder”. Final version:

Moss Glenn Falls at Granville, Vermont
Canon EOS 20D with Canon EF 17-40mm f/4 IS USM lens at 17mm
6s at f/16, ISO 100
Singh-Ray Gold-N-Blue Polarizer
Gitzo G2220 tripod, Really Right Stuff BH-55 ballhead, cable release, mirror lockup

Here’s a closeup of the difference between the gold hues from another image. The left image being with the “Yellow” hue unadjusted, and the right image with the Yellow hue tweaked to -20 to add some red to it:

Left: the unadjusted “greenish” gold. Right: the adjusted “redder” gold

So, now you’ve learned how to color balance an image shot using the Gold-N-Blue polarizer… In a nutshell: forget the in-camera white balance setting or the preset values in your RAW converter. Instead, the white balance using the eye dropper on an area of the image that should be color neutral (or close to it), and then tweak the color tempareture and tint “by hand” to your liking. Once this is done, you may want to manuall change the yellow hue to adjust the gold polarization.

Interestingly, when using the Gold-N-Blue at sunrise or sunset, when the colors in the sky are soft, muted pastel colors, leaving some or all of the magenta tint in the image actually works very well. What you’d do is to either set the camera white balance to Sunlight or Auto, and shoot away. In your RAW converter, you may want to either reduce the overall saturation, or set the green-magenta tint to a value between -10 and -25, as otherwise the magenta is a bit overpowering.

Late August Sunset Over Lake of Two Moutains
Canon EOS 20D with Canon EF 17-40mm f/4 IS USM lens at 28mm
2s at f/16, ISO 100
Singh-Ray Gold-N-Blue Polarizer (blue polarization) and Hitech 3-stop hard-edged GND filter
Gitzo G2220 tripod, Really Right Stuff BH-55 ballhead, cable release, mirror lockup

White balance is at 5000K (in-camera Auto white balance) and tint is at -20. Note that there is absolutely no post-processing done to this image, and it is very close to what I saw through the lens that evening. Ah, yes… this filter can do wonders, injecting beautiful colors in otherwise dull overcast conditions.

Sojourns In Nature is very proud to announce that we are now sponsored by:

We’ll elaborate on this in our next blog as we are still working on the details, but we are excited to announce that Gary Farber from Hunt’s Photo, Video and Digital has agreed to sponsor Sojourns In Nature. Gary has generously offered to contribute $125.00 toward the cost of our multimedia presentation, “Sojourns in The Wild – Farther Afield” and all he’s asking in return is an invitation from the club, museum, theatre, campus, or organization hosting the show to attend the presentation and set up his Hunt’s exhibit. This reduces the cost of the presentation to $225.00! You get the presentation, a field seminar, and two pros to tap for advice, deals on gear, and otherwise abuse us until you run out of questions or they throw us out of the pub.


Well, that’s it for now, friends. As usual, I am happy to answer any photography-related question you may have. You can contact me by leaving a comment on this (or any other) post, or by email (go to the Sojourns In Nature site).

All the best in the new year.

Rob

Posted by Rob under Filters,L'Ile Bizard (Quebec),Technique,Vermont,Winter | Comments (8)