Awful red lighting(color cast)

gluwater

I took this picture at Big Bar at the Hyatt in Downtown Chicago and the lighting was terrible for photography. I tried to fix it but there is a huge fix needed.

This is what I started with:


And this is what I ended up with:


Can anyone help me with this? Or is this just too bad to really fix?

Thanks

BigAl

Nick, about 1 min with Paint Shop Pro 9's "Manual color correction" using the girl's forehead as a sample, and a generic skin color.



One could do further minor color corrections from here on in...

wholenewlight

Pretty tough color cast but here's my go at it:



I worked off of your corrected shot (http://gluwater.smugmug.com/photos/52897505-L.jpg). Mainly my PS changes were to convert to LAB, select a better white point, steepen the a/b curves a little, and change the curve a little to add a little magenta and blue to the shot.

My quickie correction.

livinginoz

i would like to see a little more light on the teeth and eyes........i took a shot at it if that's ok. i did some burning on the faces, lightened eyes and teeth, added a cool filter and desaturated a little.

wholenewlight

livinginoz wrote:

i would like to see a little more light on the teeth and eyes........i took a shot at it if that's ok. i did some burning on the faces, lightened eyes and teeth, added a cool filter and desaturated a little.

Good idea, I didn't think of that. Teeth look great. Eyes look good but his eyes might be a bit "over-dodged" - they have a strange "stare'ing" look to them IMO

gluwater

Thanks for the good ideas guys/gals your fixes look real nice. I'll try out a couple and see which work the best for me. I'll post my final rendition when I'm done.

gluwater

Well I think I'm done with this, at least for now. I'm fairly happy with the results I recieved. I'm still open to any new tips so if you have them please let me know. Also if you want to play around with it here are links to the originals:
right click and save as
Unedited
Most recent Edit

Here is what I ended up with. Let me know if you'd like to know what I did.

jfriend

Black and white your best option

gluwater wrote:

Well I think I'm done with this, at least for now. I'm fairly happy with the results I recieved. I'm still open to any new tips so if you have them please let me know.

I'm dying to know how this exposure happened this way. The red channel seems to be pretty normal, but the blue and green channels are massively underexposed in the foreground. Yet, the background is fairly normal in all channels. It's almost as if it was taken with a red flash.

Anyway, after playing with the color image for awhile, I decided that the best treatment for this one is a black and white. This is the result of resetting the white point on the blue and green channels to restore some detail from them. Then, use channel mixer to take r=24%, g=78% and b=10%. Red has some nice highlights and some useful detail in their clothes, green the most detail in the face, blue lots of noise. Then, a little Neat Image on the noise and a little sharpening.

The background highlights are blown in this one. It would be possible to do a B&W conversion without blowing the highlights there (either with masking or different curves for the white point), but I kind of liked the way this turned out as it seems to serve to focus the eye on the foreground.

jfriend

My best shot at a color version

gluwater wrote:

I'm still open to any new tips so if you have them please let me know.

Here's what I could come up with in the color version. The color detail is pretty severely damaged in the faces. I tried to make a series of channel adjustments until I got most of the skin tone into what is considered an acceptable range for caucassians. After doing so, it came out more gray and with less color detail than I wanted, but that's the limit of what I can do with the time and skills I have. I also found a lot of color noise which I tried to soften by blurring the A and B channels in LAB mode. I protected the background with a mask so it stayed relatively unaffected while I worked on the people. In the end, I think I like the B&W version better.

gluwater

jfriend wrote:

I'm dying to know how this exposure happened this way. The red channel seems to be pretty normal, but the blue and green channels are massively underexposed in the foreground. Yet, the background is fairly normal in all channels. It's almost as if it was taken with a red flash.

You are close about the red flash. It was very dimmly lit in the bar and they had different colored lights instead of white lights. We happened to be sitting directly under a red light. The shot is also soft because even with the Canon 50mm f/1.4 shot at 1.4 I only got 1/15 shutter speed. I guess I should have used the flash but I'm not a big fan of using flash, partly because I don't know how to use it to it's potential. The background is "normal" because the bar is on the second floor and looks looks out over the main floor so the background did not have the same lighting as the bar did.

jfriend wrote:

Anyway, after playing with the color image for awhile, I decided that the best treatment for this one is a black and white.

I agree about the B&W. I just wanted to see if the color version could be salvaged. I like your B&W but I think it does have a bit of .jpg artifacts, or maybe oversharpened.

gluwater

jfriend wrote:

Here's what I could come up with in the color version. The color detail is pretty severely damaged in the faces. I tried to make a series of channel adjustments until I got most of the skin tone into what is considered an acceptable range for caucassians. After doing so, it came out more gray and with less color detail than I wanted, but that's the limit of what I can do with the time and skills I have. I also found a lot of color noise which I tried to soften by blurring the A and B channels in LAB mode. I protected the background with a mask so it stayed relatively unaffected while I worked on the people. In the end, I think I like the B&W version better.

I ran into the same problems when I was working on the image. My version is too red but I liked that better than the alternatives I came up with. I figure the color can add to the feel of the surroundings. I also used a mask on the background to preserve it's color. A couple other things I did was to brighten the eyes and teeth on separate layers. I selected them and used a feather on the selection of 5 pixels, brightened them with the L channel in Lab and then used the eraser to get them looking right to me. I also adjusted the a and b channels with adjustment layers and erased them slightly on the lips and parts of the face to get some of the color back.

Thanks for the help with this picture. I appreciate it and hopefully one of these days I'll get good at this.

jfriend

gluwater wrote:

I agree about the B&W. I just wanted to see if the color version could be salvaged. I like your B&W but I think it does have a bit of .jpg artifacts, or maybe oversharpened.

I made the B&W from the first image that you posted in the thread, which is pretty heavily compressed (and thus has a bunch of artifacts). If the same process was followed from your original, you likely would not see the artifacts. In my experience, JPEG artifacts get more visible when you make extreme retouch moves - probably because what were small differences in tone that were not perceptible become larger and noticable differences after big retouch changes.

Anyway, this one was an interesting learning experience to see what could be done with it.

You really ought to learn how to use your flash system. A properly exposed flash picture could have preserved most of the background, but given your subjects some better illumination and probably improved your sharpness too. A nice option to know how to take advantage of when the circumstances dictate it.

digismile

Nick,

Here's my 3 minute method for fixing (some) color casts. It really mimicks the physical effect of a on-camera filter. You are simply trying to use the inverse color of the color cast to let more of that range of colors and less/none of the color cast through to the camera. Instead, we imitate the filter effect in post. My 2-3 minute steps were:

1. Copy the background and color sample the color cast (I used the girl's cheek).
2. Create a new layer and fill the layer with the sampled color
3. Invert the color (Ctrl-I on PC) and change the layer blending options to Color.
4. Reduce the Opacity to taste (I think I was at about 30-40%)

The colors in the face should look a whole lot better, but will be a bit desaturated (which may be OK on some photos)

I quickly did two more changes: added a Hue Saturation adjustment layer and changed the hue just a bit (+5?) to be more what I expected skin color to look like (at least in these parts in the dead of winter!).

Finally, I combined all the layers into a new layer and duplicated this layer, changing the blending mode to screen (opacity 23%) to lighten the picture a bit overall.

Certainly I might spend more time in post on the eyes, etc., but just wanted to show a different result than the previous posts for dealing with a color cast.

regards,
Brad

CatOne

livinginoz wrote:

i would like to see a little more light on the teeth and eyes........i took a shot at it if that's ok. i did some burning on the faces, lightened eyes and teeth, added a cool filter and desaturated a little.

. The work on the eyes makes it look like a movie poster for a vampire movie.

CatOne

jfriend wrote:

I'm dying to know how this exposure happened this way. The red channel seems to be pretty normal, but the blue and green channels are massively underexposed in the foreground. Yet, the background is fairly normal in all channels. It's almost as if it was taken with a red flash.

Anyway, after playing with the color image for awhile, I decided that the best treatment for this one is a black and white. This is the result of resetting the white point on the blue and green channels to restore some detail from them. Then, use channel mixer to take r=24%, g=78% and b=10%. Red has some nice highlights and some useful detail in their clothes, green the most detail in the face, blue lots of noise. Then, a little Neat Image on the noise and a little sharpening.

The background highlights are blown in this one. It would be possible to do a B&W conversion without blowing the highlights there (either with masking or different curves for the white point), but I kind of liked the way this turned out as it seems to serve to focus the eye on the foreground.

YES.

Best by far, IMO.

Whatever the lighting was in the original picture, it's not just a color cast. there are huge gaps missing in the spectrum. I tried a simple eyedropper on the eyes and the teeth, and the color is still way whacked out.

I'd say... B&W is really the only option, unless you wanna throw some wacky effects in there and go Warhol.

David_S85

PSP (all versions 7-X) w/ Manual Color Correction, skintones, caucasion / Preserve lightness & Preserve saturation both unchecked.

gluwater

Brad - That is a technique I would never have thought of. It makes perfect sense though and I'll have to give it a try. Thanks for taking the time to tell us what you did.

Thanks for the comments CatOne


David_S85 - Your shot looks very similar to BigAl's shot except for brightness, and both looked good. It's good to see some PSP techniques. The manual color corection seems to be a pretty good option to go with.

pathfinder

digismile wrote:

Nick,

Here's my 3 minute method for fixing (some) color casts. It really mimicks the physical effect of a on-camera filter. You are simply trying to use the inverse color of the color cast to let more of that range of colors and less/none of the color cast through to the camera. Instead, we imitate the filter effect in post. My 2-3 minute steps were:

1. Copy the background and color sample the color cast (I used the girl's cheek).
2. Create a new layer and fill the layer with the sampled color
3. Invert the color (Ctrl-I on PC) and change the layer blending options to Color.
4. Reduce the Opacity to taste (I think I was at about 30-40%)

The colors in the face should look a whole lot better, but will be a bit desaturated (which may be OK on some photos)

I quickly did two more changes: added a Hue Saturation adjustment layer and changed the hue just a bit (+5?) to be more what I expected skin color to look like (at least in these parts in the dead of winter!).

Finally, I combined all the layers into a new layer and duplicated this layer, changing the blending mode to screen (opacity 23%) to lighten the picture a bit overall.

Certainly I might spend more time in post on the eyes, etc., but just wanted to show a different result than the previous posts for dealing with a color cast.

regards,
Brad

I like the theory and practice of this technique - not a random attempt to correct a specific image, but a well described, consitent, repeatable approach to strong cast color correction in general. Well done!

System

color-

System

b/w toned

System

sepia

Nordic

Nice picture.
Here is my turn:



Regards,
Andreas

gluwater

Andreas, those skin tones look really good, I'm not able to check the numbers right now but visually it looks very good. Would you mind sharing what you did to acheive this? Thanks.

Gordon

Combination
Thanks Brad for such a simple technique to remove cast. It works and very easy to apply. By using your technique first then going into LAB to adjust the a/b curves to a "normal" skin tone, applied HIRALOAM sharping, I came up with this.

Nordic

gluwater wrote:

Andreas, those skin tones look really good, I'm not able to check the numbers right now but visually it looks very good. Would you mind sharing what you did to acheive this? Thanks.

Hi!
I just used a plugin called Colorwasher.
( http://www.thepluginsite.com/products/photowiz/colorwasher/index.htm )