Balancing Light and Dark Spots
jsedlak
Registered Users Posts: 487 Major grins
I am having trouble getting white balance and exposure correct without blowing both or one of the ends of the white to black spectrum. Here is a sample image taken from tonight...
Full Res Original:
http://images.jsedlak.org/random/neil_raw.jpg
Modified... PS CS2 on Auto Levels and Color blows out his collar and loses a lot of the warmth in his skin. In this shot it seems that I have gotten a pretty good tone for his skin, but his collar is semi blown and the tree in the back is completely lost or under-blown/exposed. I know it is under-exposed a LOT in the original, but it seems a lot worse to me in the final image.
The second problem is how to gain white balance correctness without losing color skin tones... I really enjoy the warmth of the original shot, but I don't enjoy how the white balance is off... I have a lot of trouble finding balance.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Full Res Original:
http://images.jsedlak.org/random/neil_raw.jpg
Modified... PS CS2 on Auto Levels and Color blows out his collar and loses a lot of the warmth in his skin. In this shot it seems that I have gotten a pretty good tone for his skin, but his collar is semi blown and the tree in the back is completely lost or under-blown/exposed. I know it is under-exposed a LOT in the original, but it seems a lot worse to me in the final image.
The second problem is how to gain white balance correctness without losing color skin tones... I really enjoy the warmth of the original shot, but I don't enjoy how the white balance is off... I have a lot of trouble finding balance.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
0
Comments
Are familiar with the Info palette in PS? When I bring your "final" version into the program, I see whites in the most exposed areas in the 249-252 range (out of 255 max), in the red at least. If you're going to print it, you should probably bring this down a bit. There's some blue in the less exposed white on his shoulder.
Blacks (at least those on his shoulder sleeve) aren't gone, but mostly at acceptable levels in the low-mid teens. Some 0-0-0's in his hair, which is OK.
Visibly, the white looks like you've overdone a curves or levels adj a bit. Auto corrects are worth a try, but I've pretty much given up on them.
My impression would be to back off on the contrast a bit overall, and do some local work with feathered selections and curves or levels adj layers to fine tune the lightest and darkest areas (bringing them towards the middle a bit). A specific suggestion would be to lighted the shadow under his right brow a bit so his eye is more visible - you will probably need to also add a little contrast here if you lighten it.
Is this making sense? HOpe it helps. There are others here who can probably be of more help to you, so keep the faith!
Good work so far - in a week or so, you'll probably wonder why it seemed so hard!:D
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First, auto-levels is not the way to retouch most images. What it does is apply a levels correction to each individual color channel. It will make the brightest thing in the image be pure white (255,255,255) and the darkest thing in the image be pure black (0,0,0) or near those values depending upon how you have Photoshop configured. If either the brightest object or the darkest object are not supposed to be a perfect white/black, then you will get color shifts in the image. And, it will force objects in your image to the brightness extremes which you may not want. I never use that function. For a picture like this that already has a fairly full dynamic range of tones, I don't use levels at all. I would just apply a small curve where I pull up the middle of the curve a small amount to raise the mid-tone brightness, leaving the dark tones, light tones and the color completely untouched.
Second, you have an image here that has a fairly full dynamic range. The brights in the shirt are in the 230's and the darks in the background are less than 10. That means you have to make a choice when exposing this image for which one you are going to favor and capture detail in. If you favor the brights, you will be able to see detail in the shirt, but the background will get so dark that you can't see much detail at all. If you favor the darks in the background, you will overexpose the shirt and lose detail in it. Even when the highlights are not technically "blown" (e.g. all at 255), it's still difficult for the eye to see highlight detail over about 225-230. So, because today's dSLR sensors can't capture more dynamic range, you have to make a choice. Usually, it's best to preserve the highlight detail, but it all depends on your subject and how important the shadow detail is. In this shot, I think you've got a pretty good exposure and color. You just need to raise the mid-tone brightness a little bit while preserving color, shadows and highlights. You can do that easily with the curve I described above. You can also do it by moving the middle slider (not the ends) in the levels dialog. For small movements in either curves or levels, the color will stay relatively constant. If you want to make sure the color stays constant, you can set the blend mode on a curve adjustment layer to luminosity mode. If the curve still raises the brightness of the shift a bit too much, you can either change the shape of the curve to fix that or you can mask off the brightest part of the shirt.
You can sometimes also play with shadow/highlights on an image like this. It's revealing that an extreme move with the shadow slider reveals there is actually detail in the dark area to the right of the Christmas tree. With a little more work that detail could be recovered without affecting the rest of the image, but it's only something that can be done in post processing or with different lighting at the time of the shot, not by just changing any exposure settings on your camera.
Here's one take on it.
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I haven't been using Auto Color as much lately, because now that I shoot digital RAW instead of film, the color and tone balancing is now taken care of back at the raw converter.
Is it ok to leave a little bit of a warm tone instead of perfectly white balancing? I ask because my latest candids were very warm (the room was very warmly lit with orange-ish bulbs) and I felt bad going for white balance as it lost the warm feeling of the room.
This is totally up to you. For the kinds of photos I take, my only goal is to make them look nice and to have them feeling like a natural photo. Sometimes I find it useful to make sure neutral things are truly neutral and sometimes I find it's better to leave the image a little warmer. You should also remember that a pure white object illuminated by warm lighting (like a sunset) will look more natural if you let it take on some of the warm lighting so that it is not perfectly neutral. I'd say, just let your eyes be a guide.
So, in answer to your question. If it looks better a little warmer and that looks natural to you for the scene, then by all means leave it that way.
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