Écorce D’Arbre Lumineux

iPhone 4S; 1/120 @ f/2.4, ISO 64.

Imagine if your color perception was so acute, you could see colors others couldn’t.

I recently listened to a RadioLab podcast that spoke of an animal that could do just that; the Mantis Shrimp. Shortly thereafter, I came across a tree with particularly colorful bark. For a tree that is. So I snapped this picture. And from that point on, I began to look at trees a little differently. I began to envision the latent colors in the bark, just waiting to be extracted. Certainly if I could not see them with the naked eye, I could find a way to enhance them through post-processing so I could.

Nikon D90, 1/125s @ f/5.0, -1, ISO 200.
Original image

Knowing that the L*a*b color space allows you to work with color independently of exposure, I began to develop a processing workflow around it.  And this is what I came up with…

Above image, processed in L*a*b*.

The colors you see are not false colors, such as in color infrared photography or thermography, but the actual hues in the tree bark, enhanced in the L*a*b* color space. Just as you use levels to remap the range of luminosity in a photo to match its output space, so you can use curves in L*a*b* to do the same with color in a image relatively devoid of it. Here are some more examples of my ongoing work, which I refer to as Écorce D’Arbre Lumineux.

Canon PosweShot, SD780 IS; 1/640s @ f/4.5, -0.33, ISO 200.
Original image.

Above image, processed in L*a*b*.

1/125 @ f/13, -0.33, ISO 200.
Original image.

Above image, processed in L*a*b*.

iPhone 4S; 1/120 @ f/2.4, ISO 64.
Original image.

Above image, processed in L*a*b*.