Compensating for Bad Lighting / Color Cast

kres

I was fooling around while my kid played at the coffee house with the new 50mm 1.4, taking some snaps of him and the other munckins running about. This is one of his pals. This was shot at 1600ISO 50mm f1.4/100



The walls in this place were green, and illuminated by incandescent spotlights AND he was wearing a red fleece. Combo from hell.

After playing around with it for awhile, this is what I've got:



Now, I do see that it's an improvement, but I was wondering what the peanut gallery has to say about skin tone, and wanted to solict for help on getting the grain out of his face. (Hmm.... staring at it awhile I see that his face is too pink... wow, even more redreductions to come.)

Thanks for lookn'

kres

Hmmm...

Guess I'll chronical my own improvements.



Even more tweaking of the blue and red channels. The CYMK trick failed misrabley 'cause of the grain. So I applied a paint filter and cranked the brush size Waaaaaaaaaaay down, and tweaked the sharpness. I figured that the grains in the shots killed off alot of detail anyway, so why not give it a shot.

It's intresting, on my Huey balanced monitor, the image looks a lot cleaner in photoshop, windows image viewer, and lightroom. Once linked into SmugMug, it get's washed out a little.

mereimage

I like to correct overall color in lab
then do any curves a nd shadow opening. Back in RGB to fine tune color balance-then I'll freq. see what a blue amber or green filter does to the image-this helps me to recognize any residual color cast-sometimes when I've been staring at the monitor all night I can get desensitzed to some casts. Here's a 2 min. run of this pic. :



Interestingly (as Kres noted in his image) this view on smug-dgrin seems to have lightened the pants more and lessened the contrast than was evident when I had it in PS2

.......................Mereimage

dogwood

And of course there's always b & w.

Something I often do with an image like this is open a saturation adjustment layer-- move the sliders and you can easily see which color in the skin is overdone-- in this case it looked like red. Pull the red down a bit, flip your adjustment layer (alt-backspace on a PC) and paint back in over the face. It's quick and dirty but also very effective.

kres

Mere - Wow... I think I'll take a crack at learning LAB. That's an impressive Technique.

'Wood - Yah... I went for B&W out of the box, but it really didn't work very well with this subject - and the grain really blew it out of scope.

Maybe I'll try the LAB color correction and the try my paint stroke trick to kill off some of the grain.

dogwood

kres wrote:

Maybe I'll try the LAB color correction and the try my paint stroke trick to kill off some of the grain.

I've had decent luck reducing noise with the Fred Miranda noise reduction filter (and it's only 20-bucks). Or... if the skin is all you're worried about, you can do a surface blur in PSCS along with a couple of other tricks to add back the texture-- there's a fantastic technique outlined in "Skin" by Lee Varis. I've created an action for it and use it all the time.

cocasana

Hi Kres, here's my try. I've assumed that the t shirt's collar was black and that the heron's body was neutral gray. I've neutralized them with level and numbers. Then selective red desaturation. Selective noise removal (Noise Ninja). Multipass sharpening.

manta1900

I tried.....
...

Sam

Here is my version.

Sam

CatOne

I take it you shot JPEG? If you had shot RAW a click on the swan in the background should have pretty much been a one-shot deal... or at least given you a great starting point.

davev

CatOne wrote:

I take it you shot JPEG? If you had shot RAW a click on the swan in the background should have pretty much been a one-shot deal... or at least given you a great starting point.

Even with a JPG this can be done.
In Elements it's Enhance>Adjust Color>Remove Color Cast.

Use the little eyedropper and click on something white in the picture.

(RAW is over rated):D

ZioLupo

This is my version: