How to deal with amber street lights?

Bayer-Z28

We had an AMAZING electrical storm last night that was about 20 miles outside of town. So I ran home, grabbed the camera and my tri-pod and headed up to the higher part of town to try and get some shots of the lightning. I left my lens open for about 10 minutes but the camera picked up on the annoying amber street lights and turned the picture orange.. :bluduh

Is this just as simple as fixing it with Photoshop?

Richard

Bayer-Z28 wrote:

We had an AMAZING electrical storm last night that was about 20 miles outside of town. So I ran home, grabbed the camera and my tri-pod and headed up to the higher part of town to try and get some shots of the lightning. I left my lens open for about 10 minutes but the camera picked up on the annoying amber street lights and turned the picture orange.. :bluduh

Is this just as simple as fixing it with Photoshop?

Hopefully, you were shooting RAW. It then becomes fairly easy to adjust the white balance in ACR or LR. Just find something in the scene that should be neutral and click the WB dropper on it. Fine tune with the temp and tint sliders. You can also open a JPG in ACR and do the same thing, though it doesn't work quite as well. Otherwise, you will have to muck with curves, lowering the red and raising the blue and green as needed. If that sounds too daunting, you could try using a cooling filter in PS. Lots of ways to fix it.

Nikolai

Do you have a sample?

Bayer-Z28

uuuh... Beware.. This was a disaster... Of course the good shots happen after you close the lens.. :bluduh

I guess my lens was dirty too... The wind was wippin BAD towards the end. I tried to fix this one a little bit. I didn't put a lot of work into it... Just messed with the color balance real quick, then gave up.

Nikolai

Bayer-Z28 wrote:

uuuh... Beware.. This was a disaster... Of course the good shots happen after you close the lens.. :bluduh

I guess my lens was dirty too... The wind was wippin BAD towards the end. I tried to fix this one a little bit. I didn't put a lot of work into it... Just messed with the color balance real quick, then gave up.

Yeah... I see. Well, you were agaist "force major", I don't think you could win this case...

pathfinder

Shoot in Tungsten light balance. The lightning will still be white!

Nikolai

pathfinder wrote:

Shoot in Tungsten light balance. The lightning will still be white!

I believe it's not the amber color, but the huge light pollution which is the main problem here. Color is easy to get rid of, but with the sheer amount of light the rest of the image looks, uhm, poor...

pathfinder

Agreed, Nik.

He could have used a shorter shutter speed or smaller aperture to cut back on ambient light while waiting for lightning, perhaps.

Nikolai

pathfinder wrote:

Agreed, Nik.

He could have used a shorter shutter speed or smaller aperture to cut back on ambient light while waiting for lightning, perhaps.

Jim,
while these are reasonable suggestions I doubt they would help much. I once made a mistake of trying to capture a meteo shower from Mt. Wilson. I was too lazy to drive to Mt.Pinos (30..40 minutes longer drive). So I ended up wasting the whole night shoot simply because LA is one giant light bulb..

Bayer-Z28

It was either shoot where I was, or have the Imax theater in my way and have those amber street lights above me and effecting the picture from above, which come to think of it, may not have effected the pic that much. But then I'd have the same darn lights below.... ... Bah... This was a three level parking area at the Alamo Space Museum.

I TRY to go out and find shots in this small town, but they're either hard to compose, something in the way or those darn amber street lights are ALL OVER THE PLACE! The Hospital has SUPERB lighting, but not much to work with. Good for shots of the car, though.

I'm gonna try from up on a different location tomorrow night.. Thunder Rd, sitting on the side of the mountain.. It's monsoon season here, so we will get storms blowing through frequently.. Nothing tonight.. I had to make a run to the Airport anyway.. I'll try tungsten next time.

I REALLY just wanted to capture a whole plethora of lightening strikes. But as we know, that dream shot is hard to come by. And of course, as soon as I got up there, they died down and the clouds were blocking the strikes..

pathfinder wrote:

Agreed, Nik.

He could have used a shorter shutter speed or smaller aperture to cut back on ambient light while waiting for lightning, perhaps.

If I would have used a smaller aperture, wouldn't it have effected my focus at that distance? Even though I set the lens focus to infinite manual? I think I used f20 or 18. and ISO 800, shutter was bulb manual.

Tee Why

In PS, try selecting Hues and then turn down the saturation slider on the Red and/or Yellow colors.