Color and calibration and green prints

Andy

Let's learn together, shall we?

Got this by email, the emailer will be watching this thread:

anonymous emailer wrote:

Thank You! Do you have any ideas about the green? Could it be the white balance? or the lights? I don't really know & am not sure how to cllibrate my monitor, but will look on my gallery tommorrow.

Thanks again!

OK so here is the original file that her customer received, and the complaint on the print was "eww these are too green!"



So, yes indeed the photo is green. It's usually white balance related but in this case the skin tone is just off and I'm sure that the photographer's monitor could use some calibration.

What do you guys say? Let's talk about causes, and suggestions and remedies, not fixing the photo (which has already been done).

jfriend

Some ideas/thoughts

Andy wrote:

Let's learn together, shall we?

Got this by email, the emailer will be watching this thread:

OK so here is the original file that her customer received, and the complaint on the print was "eww these are too green!"

So, yes indeed the photo is green. It's usually white balance related but in this case the skin tone is just off and I'm sure that the photographer's monitor could use some calibration.

What do you guys say? Let's talk about causes, and suggestions and remedies, not fixing the photo (which has already been done).

I'm certainly not an expert on this, but I am trying to get good at this so I'll take a shot at contributing and happily read what others write too.

I'm not sure what question you are asking. As I presume you know, the skin tone on the girl in the back shows: C:38%, M:45%, Y:65%, K:10%. From what I've learned so far, the Cyan is way to high and the black is hgher than to be expected for caucassian skin tone. The ratio of Magenta to Yellow is plausible. Also, all the numbers are a little high because the image appears a little too dark to me. You can also see a bit of a cast in both of the girls with black hair which really ought to be neutral.

The background is relatively neutral. I'd guess that the white balance was set based on the background (either automatically by the camera or in post). So, if the background is neutral and the subjects are not, then there can only be two plausible explanations. Either the background was not really neutral in real life and making it come out neutral pushed off the people or the background and people are lit with different temperature lighting so the only way to make them both come out neutral is to PP them separately. Set one to be right and the other will be off.

Another observation. If I just apply a very simple curve that does nothing but raise the mid-tones in the center of the curve and I apply the curve in Luminosity blend mode, there's still just a little too much cyan, but the image gets a lot closer to something that would print well. So, having the people underexposed may have contributed to the problem too.

As for shooting time remedies, the best one I can think of is to use a calibrated gray card and set the camera while balance off that card with one of the people holding it in the exact lighting conditions of the main shot. Alternatively, take a reference shot with the subject holding the gray card and then set the white balance in post processing to make the card neutral. This shot also has a bit too much backlighting so the photographer either needs to spot meter off the subjects or use some exposure compensation to avoid the effect of the bright background on the metering. Lastly, it appears possible that the background and subject are lit with different temperature lighting. That will always be a challenge if you don't want one of them to be off.

wxwax

Way underexposed. I assume that threw off the white balance.

Always view the histogram. Use the spot meter on your camera.

jfriend

Histogram is confused by the high-key background

wxwax wrote:

Way underexposed. I assume that threw off the white balance.

Always view the histogram. Use the spot meter on your camera.

I don't know how helpful the histogram would have been here in the full shot without a lot of histogram interpretation smarts. The problem is there's a lot of high-key white in the background while will mix up the histogram and make it hard to see how just the people are exposed. The histogram in PS looks like this:


So, unless you have enough courage and confidence to ignore the right part of the histogram because you know it's the background, the histogram might mislead you too.

Your suggestion of spot metering or another idea of just using regular metering from a closer position that will not include any background in the metering would give you that confidence and info to get the metering right.

wxwax

Understood re: histogram - yes, you'll have to be able to read one properly. But the white background is pretty clearly different to the foreground figures, I figure it's a relatively easy task to distinguish between the two.

rutt

The big simple post processing lesson is don't trust your eyes. They will fool you over and over no matter how much experience you have.

As JFriend implied, use the color sampler to look at the colors in you image and decide if they are plausible. What's plausible is something you'll have to learn and the SmugMug help page is a fine place to start. The deep source of this information is Dan Margulis' book Professional Photoshop but that's more of a life study than an intro.