Birthday girl

reyvee61

My youngest daughter turned eleven on Thanksgiving as she was born on turkey day it falls on that day every four years or so....

I can never quit tinkering with camera techniques so I took a bit of what I recently learned and applied it.
Namely using strobes to just barely augment the ambient light.

I did have a bit of an issue with WB though because of that.

1.



2.



3.

With her cousin, best friend and exclusive (only) guest as usual....



Thanks for peeping

briandelion

I bet they love that last one- total chaos! The white balance issue is an easy enough fix. Will really make them pop!

anonymouscuban

Rey,

The lighting on these are nice, especially the first one. These will be great once you correct WB.

reyvee61

Thanks guys...more than anything I'm have trouble keeping all these within the same range.
I'll be tinkering in post to see if I can find a way to keep it consistent. I don't think that auto wb is a good way to go when the light sources can be so mixed.
Correct me if I'm wrong but while shooting manual flash via triggers, the camera reads the white balance based on the ambient light not accounting for the flash?

anonymouscuban

Rey... do you have Photoshop? If so, try this:

1. Make a blank layer
2. Go to Edit > Fill
3. In the pop-up, set the Fill to 50% Gray, 100% Opacity and the Blend Mode to Difference, then click OK
4. Now add a Threshold adjustment layer
5. In the Threshold dialog box, take the slider all the way to the left and then slowly drag it to the right until you begin to see black areas which are neutral gray areas, assuming there are some
6. Use the color sampler tool (in Eye Dropper menu) to place markers on the black areas
7. Now discard the Threshold layer and Gray filled layer
8. Add a curves adjustment layer and select the center Eye Dropper (Gray Point) from the curves menu
9. Click on one of the markers from step 6 to set the gray point and fix the WB on your image
10. Leave if you're satisified or undo and try another one of the markers you made

This won't work with all images since it has to contain a neutral gray point. However, looking at all three of these shots, it appears that they do contain gray. This should make it easy to get a consistent WB among all three. BTW, you can do something very similar in LR2/3 by using the Custom WB tool but I like the method above since I can identify the gray points more precisely.

Hope this helps.

Mike J

First off - happy birthday to you daughter. Two more and you have a teenager. Good luck with that.
I'm just learning all of this light stuff as well but wouldn't gelling the flash to match the ambient work in this case?

anonymouscuban

Mike J wrote: »

First off - happy birthday to you daughter. Two more and you have a teenager. Good luck with that.
I'm just learning all of this light stuff as well but wouldn't gelling the flash to match the ambient work in this case?

I don't think it's the color balance between the different light sources. It's the overall color balance of the image. I took liberties with the first shot. Huge difference IMO and all I did was fix the color balance, nothing else. Hope you don't mind Rey:

Mike J

anonymouscuban wrote: »

I don't think it's the color balance between the different light sources. It's the overall color balance of the image. I took liberties with the first shot. Huge difference IMO and all I did was fix the color balance, nothing else. Hope you don't mind Rey:

What an improvement this makes.

anonymouscuban

Here's the other two... the Cyan was pushed really high on all of them. Almost equal to Yellow. Magenta was a little high too but the offenders was cyan:



This one looks a little different because I think the original processing differs from the other shots. Maybe more contrast or it could be that the light source is further away.

divamum

Did you do those using that method, Alex? Impressive. I tend to use LR, which has worked best for me, but I do struggle sometimes in mixed light temps.

She's a cutie, Rey - looks like they had a ball!

anonymouscuban

divamum wrote: »

Did you do those using that method, Alex? Impressive. I tend to use LR, which has worked best for me, but I do struggle sometimes in mixed light temps.

She's a cutie, Rey - looks like they had a ball!

No Diva, I didn't use that method. I did try but it turns out that the first image didn't really have any neutral gray points. That method relies solely on the image having a gray point.

I converted the image to CYMK and then applied a curve adjustment layer. I then sampled a spot on her forehead (CTRL+SHIFT+Click). Then I adjusted the Magenta and Cyan channel so it's relative value to Yellow is what you'd expect for a Caucasian person. I find that Magenta should be 85% and Cyan should be at 42% of the Yellow channel. This may sound complicated but it's not. You simply take the value for the yellow channel and multiply it by .85 and .42 to get your magenta and cyan values respectively.

For example... On the first shot, I sampled a spot on her forehead that was mainly midtones. The yellow channel was 47%. So I took 47 and multiplied it by .85 and I got 40. I set the magenta channel to 40%. I think it was like 46 originally. Then to adjust cyan, I again multiplied the yellow value, 47, by .42 and got 20. I set the cyan channel to 20; it was 45 before. This looked pretty good to me so I left it. I then did the same to the other two shots... keep in mind that the values of C, Y, and M will change depending on where you take your sample. However, the relative difference should remain the same.

Hope that makes sense.

BTW Rey... I absolutely love all three shots. Especially the first one.

reyvee61

anonymouscuban wrote: »

No Diva, I didn't use that method. I did try but it turns out that the first image didn't really have any neutral gray points. That method relies solely on the image having a gray point.

I converted the image to CYMK and then applied a curve adjustment layer. I then sampled a spot on her forehead (CTRL+SHIFT+Click). Then I adjusted the Magenta and Cyan channel so it's relative value to Yellow is what you'd expect for a Caucasian person. I find that Magenta should be 85% and Cyan should be at 42% of the Yellow channel. This may sound complicated but it's not. You simply take the value for the yellow channel and multiply it by .85 and .42 to get your magenta and cyan values respectively.

For example... On the first shot, I sampled a spot on her forehead that was mainly midtones. The yellow channel was 47%. So I took 47 and multiplied it by .85 and I got 40. I set the magenta channel to 40%. I think it was like 46 originally. Then to adjust cyan, I again multiplied the yellow value, 47, by .42 and got 20. I set the cyan channel to 20; it was 45 before. This looked pretty good to me so I left it. I then did the same to the other two shots... keep in mind that the values of C, Y, and M will change depending on where you take your sample. However, the relative difference should remain the same.

Hope that makes sense.

BTW Rey... I absolutely love all three shots. Especially the first one.

Wow Alex!
Thanks for the tips.
I do have PS and I'll give latter method a shot to see how I do.
They look way better
Thank you Sir

reyvee61

Mike J wrote: »

First off - happy birthday to you daughter. Two more and you have a teenager. Good luck with that.
I'm just learning all of this light stuff as well but wouldn't gelling the flash to match the ambient work in this case?

Thanks Mike...this is my second time around so I do know what you mean about the teen years.....
I have heard of using gels for such purposes as well....

reyvee61

divamum wrote: »

Did you do those using that method, Alex? Impressive. I tend to use LR, which has worked best for me, but I do struggle sometimes in mixed light temps.

She's a cutie, Rey - looks like they had a ball!

Alex did great on these....

Thanks Diva, they had a blast they did.....

reyvee61

Before I tried Alex's technique I thought I would give a go with CNX2 since it is my main editing software and there are several tools available with the Color Efex Pro plug-in as well though of all the choices I found the "Neutral Control Point" to be the most effective and was not to thrilled with the "White Neutralizer" or "Remove Color Cast" tools in CEP

Here is what I came up with though not as appealing as what Alex did:

anonymouscuban

Rey, that's pretty darn close. When you say "Neutral Control Point", is that an action or "tool" withing CNX2? If we can go by the title of the action, it sounds like it's essentially doing what I described in the first set of instruction I posted but at the click of a button which is nice.

reyvee61

Yes, it's part of the Nik Software U Point technology.
Just drop a point anywhere in the frame and make adjustments accordingly.


Just a raw image and screen capture to show the interface.

I've never thought of using it but now I think I'll be more apt to.
Thanks for your help, I'm still going to try the technique with PS as well.