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Archive 2015 · How to handle this white balance?

  
 
Squirrely Eyed
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p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · How to handle this white balance?


I had this mixed lighting situation, shot in raw, and am not quite sure how to process it. I have a SOOC crop and attempt at white balancing to the room lighting. Upon doing that, the scene looks natural to me but the blue channel clips on his face & ear.




Jan 27, 2015 at 10:41 AM
tdlavigne
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p.1 #2 · p.1 #2 · How to handle this white balance?


Some creative masking would be my vote


Jan 27, 2015 at 10:44 AM
gdanmitchell
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p.1 #3 · p.1 #3 · How to handle this white balance?


An image like this raises all kinds of interesting post processing questions, some technical and some aesthetic. I'm not going to attempt to deal with all of them, but a few thoughts...

"Correcting" colors in a photograph made in a mixed lighting environment like this one is extremely tricky. It is unlikely that any global adjustment (aside from going to black and white!) will resolve all of them — adjust to minimize the warm yellow of that very bright (and distracting) lamp behind your subject and you'll amplify the issues with the blue colors from the lamps on the tree. Try to correct the skin tones (which are far from natural, again from the tree lights) and other colorations will become far worse.

In addition, I'm betting that various color channels are blown out in different parts of the scene. You have likely blown the red channel in the area of that lamp and perhaps on the back of the shirt. It is possible that you have blown the blue channel in some spots as well, perhaps including the boy's face. (Here, shooting the photograph differently might have helped — though that may not have been possible. I might have positioned the camera so that the lamp was out of the frame. I might have considered at least a bit of fill flash, both to counteract some of the very bright areas and to diminish the contribution of the highly colored areas relative to the overall scene.)

As to the aesthetic issue, you probably do not want to color to be completely neutral in the end. The boy's face should be blue, since he is facing the blue light of the tree. This means that the goal is probably not to get to a "normal" color balance (which would lose the very quality of the image) but to back off a bit on the intensity of the color shifts.

Good luck.

Dan



Jan 27, 2015 at 11:25 AM
jjnyc
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p.1 #4 · p.1 #4 · How to handle this white balance?


Try lowering the blue saturation.


Jan 27, 2015 at 12:38 PM
Paul Mo
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p.1 #5 · p.1 #5 · How to handle this white balance?



Up the overall exposure.

Split Toning - choose yellow as highlight - and play with saturation

Then drop the global blue satch in Color.

Go from there.




Jan 27, 2015 at 09:42 PM
Squirrely Eyed
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p.1 #6 · p.1 #6 · How to handle this white balance?


Thanks for the feedback and tips!

The lamp is a nuisance to me, unfortunately in the short time I had it was the only position I could take to get his face and the lamp sits low. I should have mounted the flash before even starting & turned off that light.



Jan 27, 2015 at 10:10 PM
Alan321
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p.1 #7 · p.1 #7 · How to handle this white balance?


I disagree. You'll probably find that desaturating the colours will improve the image but the coloured light on the child's face is a valid part of the situation and should not be entirely eliminated.

- Alan



Jan 28, 2015 at 06:31 AM
Squirrely Eyed
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p.1 #8 · p.1 #8 · How to handle this white balance?


Good point Alan.


Jan 29, 2015 at 03:00 PM
Skirball
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p.1 #9 · p.1 #9 · How to handle this white balance?


Are you using Photoshop or Lightroom (or something else)?

In a full editor like Photoshop - if you're happy with everything except where the blue is clipping a bit, why not just eliminate that part? Duplicate the base layer and apply your color balance. Then put a mask on it and paint out the offending areas. If you need to, put a hue saturation layer below it (between layers) to lower the warmer skin tone of the SOOC a bit.



Jan 29, 2015 at 03:49 PM
Squirrely Eyed
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p.1 #10 · p.1 #10 · How to handle this white balance?


I mostly use LR. I have less than full PS and can move into layers work when I don't mind going down to 8-bit.

One thing in LR I had never experimented with before these suggestions is to use local adjustment brushes for things like WB & saturation.



Jan 30, 2015 at 01:20 PM
Milan Hutera
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p.1 #11 · p.1 #11 · How to handle this white balance?


I've just upgraded to LR5,7 - why not use a radial brush on the face and adjust the wb?


Jan 31, 2015 at 03:12 AM
Squirrely Eyed
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p.1 #12 · p.1 #12 · How to handle this white balance?


Update -- I loaded up a floral picture I had taken and noticed that the colors were totally oversaturated on the magentas. I loaded it up in DPP and it much closer resembled the in-camera preview.

I have not calibrated my camera in LR but just switching over to 'Camera Standard' gave a much more consistent result without blowing out the colors. I tried that on the example above and voila, my clipping issue is gone. I still have the mixed-lighting situation but it's much easier to handle with the clipping resolved.



Feb 11, 2015 at 11:35 PM
Ian.Dobinson
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p.1 #13 · p.1 #13 · How to handle this white balance?


Squirrely Eyed wrote:
Update -- I loaded up a floral picture I had taken and noticed that the colors were totally oversaturated on the magentas. I loaded it up in DPP and it much closer resembled the in-camera preview.

I have not calibrated my camera in LR but just switching over to 'Camera Standard' gave a much more consistent result without blowing out the colors. I tried that on the example above and voila, my clipping issue is gone. I still have the mixed-lighting situation but it's much easier to handle with the clipping resolved.


I like the 'Camera standard' profile in LR much more than Adobe Standard . Its my goto profile on import




Feb 12, 2015 at 03:45 AM





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