Normalizing snow: I didn't want to over-expose to keep the white, and then have to deal with making the red more vibrant, nor did I want the background to be any lighter. Instead, in pp I did selective lightening of just the snow bonnets (Cwilson341 coined that phrase ). I think I captured the pristine, crisp beauty that my eye saw at the scene.

(edit - to clarify, after reading Edie's comments below, I was thinking of crisp more as cold, fresh and new, kind of just repeating "pristine." Thank you for your observation, Edie!)

Further to exchanges elsewhere I've started a thread where I can gather a few thoughts on the pros, cons, appropriateness and inappropriateness of normalisation.

I'm not using the term "normalisation" as meaning "rendering a shot as completely normal as possible" - there are always degrees. More realistically, normalisation typically consists of a few nudges in the direction of making a shot look less strange, less artificial, less contrived - in other words reducing (not necessarily negating) whatever the departure from normality was.

For anybody with extremist views such as thinking that 'straight out of camera' (SOOC) is the only way to go, I would like to remind you that the main purpose of white balance (WB) adjustments has been to normalise shots, and we've been using them for quite some time now. If there wasn't a need to normalise, we wouldn't have WB or Tint sliders in all of our post processing (PP) editors.

At the other end of the extremist scale is the idea that we should apply normalisation universally and to the point where images are as normalised as they can be. Going to that extreme would eliminate the much-needed exceptions to the norm. Very often it's what was unusual about a scene or object that motivated us to shoot it in the first place.

It was mentioned elsewhere that our brains are constantly processing what we see. One aspect of that is that our brains will remove or reduce colouration caused by the ambient light. That's one of the reasons why people are so often surprised and disappointed that their shots have come out too blue (or yellow or pink or whatever). One implication of these facts is that being a first-hand observer of a scene doesn't guarantee that our memories are an accurate indicator of what the reality of the scene was. Our memories can lie to us whereas our camera sensors will faithfully record our captures (depending on the camera settings used). The software is designed to provide suitable WB settings, but software doesn't always know what's appropriate and we get snow that's too blue etc etc.

Another aspect of our eye/brain combo is that our ability to see details in shadows (and to a lesser extent glare) is enhanced. I've long been a proponent of using moderate HDR processing to bring a capture closer to what our perceptions were. In this context, the effect that HDR processing has would be classified as normalisation, despite the fact that it means artificially altering the luminosity gradient (i.e. messing with the light levels).


I invite you to agree/disagree with, comment on, expand on any of the above. I'm hoping that there will be images posted as examples of points being made.


I'll post an image of my own which was an attempt to capture some very unusual lighting that I came across while out shooting. I could have tried to turn the shot into one of a normal scene, but it was its unusualness that motivated me to try to capture it in the first place. The content on its own (grass, rocks, flowers, sea) wouldn't have motivated me to take the shot.
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