Here's a picture of a yellow flower in bright sunshine I took earlier this week on my Sony A700 (so a > 14 yrs old technology sensor) and struggled with to get a pleasing/detailed rendering of the yellow petals. I exposed +1/3 stop vs. the meter reading and according to raw digger none of the channels are blown out or blocked up.
However the default rendering in Lightroom checked with soft proofing saw all of the yellow flower outside the sRGB colour space, with several featureless yellow patches in the petals.
Here's the recipe that I used to process the shot:
Checked the white balance with a grey card, AWB was very close to the grey card reading, so I went with the camera AWB
Used lightroom to convert the image:
Set vibrance to -4
Set yellow saturation to -3
Set exposure to -0,5
Set clarity to +10
All other sliders zeroed
With those settings only very minor yellow parts were out of gamut (as per the lightroom soft proofing)
Exported to Photoshop and found the blue channel was blocked up on several parts of the yellow flower and the red channel was neither blocked nor blown.
Used the Shadow/highlight command and applied 4% shadow correction (tonal width 50% and 30 px radius), no highlight correction. I would have used some highlight correction in case the red channel would have blown out in the sRGB rendering). After this there were only a few minor areas left where the blue channel was blocked.
I then applied a few minor TOPAZ adjustments (clarity and detail) both on a separate layer but only used these layers with a 40% opacity
And voila, this is the end result, I don't know if you find the yellow rendering pleasing (that's a matter of taste) but the yellow is pretty close to what I perceived when taking he shot and there is texture visible in the entire petals.
I hope this recipe is useful for people who also struggle with the issue, but I also hope that people with more experience can give some tips to further improve my PP skills in this area.
