Crystal within Coffee Beans
Here is a somewhat different, rather special picture. I took it over a year ago but somehow it never quite fit to upload it. And after fixing a few quality issues with the color profile last month, I'm finally uploading it. It shows a beautiful white crystal inside dark coffee beans, which in turn are lying on a saucer. I can't remember exactly how I came up with the idea, but I just wanted to try a few things and liked the color contrast. It also gave me a chance to use my macro lens again.
The quality problems were caused on the one hand by the lens, as my lighting of the scene with a spotlight from above on the edges of the crystal and the saucer led to quite strong chromatic aberrations, which fortunately can now be removed relatively easily with Lightroom. The second problem was a relatively strong noise, caused by the high ISO value, which was necessary to keep the aperture as small as possible for more depth of field. The noise can be easily removed with the "Denoise" feature in Lightroom, but due to the nature of the image (because of the smooth, monochrome surface of the saucer, there is less detail and color differences in these areas), there were quite unsightly streaks in the JPG file, which were not visible in the Lightroom preview. The reason for this is, on the one hand, the general compression of a JPG file, which can lead to so-called artifacts (including these streaks). This problem is exacerbated by Lightroom's conversion of the Adobe RGB color space to the sRGB color space.¹ This was also the reason why I didn't upload the image for a long time. But recently I noticed that the problem can be solved by deactivating the "Embed color profile" function when exporting (in Photoshop in my case). Since I'm not familiar enough with color management, I can't say exactly what the problem is, but at least it worked. Possibly because the image did not have to be converted to a different color space.
¹ https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/help/color-management.html (14.06.2024)