I was scouting for a good place to shoot The Wasatch range with a Utah Lake foreground. (This is not it) and on the way home saw a sunset developing. I stopped here for a shot. The longest lens I had with me was 70mm so here is what I got.
That is not fog over the lake, its smog. As you can see from the SOOC it is pretty flat, but that can be fixed with curves.
I am especially thinking about how to fix the color cast. I have already worked on magenta, but if I do it globally it ruins the sky so I just did the mountains.
I also worked to get rid of the moon halo which was caused by thin clouds. I used two tricks Karen taught us. Masking the moon and putting that on another layer then using content aware to clean up the halo.
This image does not respond well to processing without some NR even though its shot at ISO100.
Fix anything, and make any suggestions that apply, but my primary concern here is color cast.
This would be my take on your image, not necessarily correct, I basically removed magenta/added green in the lightroom white balance slider. I like your image a lot, by the way.
DISCLAIMER: remember I'm really new to photography and the image below is not guaranteed to be safe for viewing
EDIT: well it should be since it's Ben's image, however I did some editing and who knows how far I might ruin other people's work?
Ben, a re-work in LR, warmed the overall color balance then broke the image into 3 parts and adjusted them separately, while not 100 correct, removed the color cast from the image. Barbara
Thanks for the reworks, never thought of warming it. But that's a place to start. I can often see a color cast but not be able to fix it. I tend to think of purple as a shade of red hence warm. Maybe its really a shade of blue?
Ha, you were still working so I will edit my reply.
I tried what you suggested before seeing it all and posted below. But I never got the brown cast you have when attempting to get to neutral. That's the key here.
For what its worth, it was not brown. Some magenta is probably natural here. Just not as much as I have in the mountain.
Adding color to the sky will take it over the top, the question which hue to favor when doing so. We have really red/magenta sunsets around here, possibly because of the haze.
RustyBug wrote:
I didn't do anything with the moon or crayon play, but here's a stab at what you're asking for ... I think.
For the mountains yes, I really like the sky I got but not the rest. So what did you do? I could see applying that to the mountains.
I suspect I am adding the cast in my effort to get back the saturation and contrast that is missing in the raw. I usually need to work on blue and magenta and sometimes green but seldom red.
Actually I had downloaded the image and was going to "fix" the color before I came to my senses. Clearly you had a spectacular sunset and any amount of saturation and impact you can add to the image will fall short of reality. I would not be surprised if the major color you had was magenta and the color was intense.
Also working on a small internet file is not the best way to fine tune colors. Often the colors are spotchy when downsized. Printing is a whole other consideration. Monitor colors never seem to match the printed colors so any fine tuning often needs to be done with printing proofs.
Anyway, bottomline, your colors look good. I will try to follow you lead and try to avoid commenting on colors for internet images...unless there is clearly an issue.
This would be my take on your image, not necessarily correct, I basically removed magenta/added green in the lightroom white balance slider. I like your image a lot, by the way.
DISCLAIMER: remember I'm really new to photography and the image below is not guaranteed to be safe for viewing
EDIT: well it should be since it's Ben's image, however I did some editing and who knows how far I might ruin other people's work?
I took the SOOC which was converted from raw with all sliders off and color at neutral.
Then I ran curves by simply sliding both sliders to clipping. This fixed the flatness and added some contrast and saturation. There is no other action here. This is what my camera and Photoshop thinks is neutral.
I tried the hue slider all the way and red was the predominate hue. Removing red did not have the desired effect.
If you go into levels or curves and set your black/white end points in the individual Red, Green & Blue channels ... followed by adjustments to the RGB composite channel, it serves as a starting point toward neutral. Subsequent, layers, opacity, masks ... you know the rest.
I typically go into color balance and play by the numbers @ known neutral. This time, I went to the individual channels @ levels/curves. Here is the blue in levels first ... followed green & red individually. After setting all three, you might go back and tweak to taste either @ R, G or B ... or RGB.
Here ya go, did I do this right? Still looks to brown to me.
This is just the individual RGB channels, I did not change the composite, wanted to take it one step at a time. I took each one right to clipping, looks like that's what you did.
Now that you've got a baseline, tweak to taste via opacity, masking or other layers, etc. ... to allow the colors of light show through where you want them, or don't want them.
ben egbert wrote:
This preserved the sky color although at a different hue. I was not able to change the sky without losing most of the color I wanted.
I thought you wanted to preserve the sky while changing the white balance, so this was the best I could do that still felt somewhat close to the feeling I had regarding the sky in your original image.
However, I believe the answer to the "correct colors" question can't really be given by anyone but yourself. You were there at the moment, so only you can remember how your brain rendered the image for you at that moment and try to reproduce it in the photo. Our brain plays tricks on us regarding color perception and white balance (as I'm sure most of the people posting on this topic already know). Probably that's why you feel the sky is very good in your original, but the mountains are off - your brain compensated the cast on the mountains while allowing you to view all those purples/pinks in the sky exactly as they were. Probably the white balance for the sky will have to be done separately from the white balance for the rest of the image.
Oh, and I'd like to say also that I'm amazed by how well RustyBug "recovered" the colors of the mountains. Perhaps a composite with his mountains? ...
EDIT: oh boy I'm a slow writer! Look how much the topic progressed while I was typing... you've already reproduced RustyBug's results!
Thanks Kent and gneto. You are right, only I know what I want. I have a sneaking suspicion that these old eyes have a built in filter and what I see in person is different than what others see.
My original image had it the way I wanted it other than the color of the mountain. I was not sure what color it even should be, but not as purple as it was.
The sky was fine. Not as colorful as that in person, too much haze, but this is what I wanted it to look like.
So now that I have the formula for the mountain, I will try another correction on my finished image. Too much work to start over. Not because I am lazy, but because I doubt I could recreate it.
Stay tuned.
Ok, I applied Kent's method to the final image and applied it only to the mountains and smog. I left the water purple because I liked it better that way.
This is sort of what I wanted. Now that I have made a choice, whatcha think? There are two things here, how to do it and how to know when you are there.
I like your last version a lot, and find it to be a real improvement over the original version.
Just for the sake of comparison, if possible, I'd like to see one more version with the foreground/lower part of the image also color-corrected like the mountains.
There are some artifacts in the border between the mountains and the clouds, where some regions of the sky are color-corrected to match the mountains (by mistake I assume) and vice-versa.
Ok, I will do it. I painted the color correction in and did a crude job. This scene does not mask well because the color transition between sky and mountain are not sharply defined.
I think you are in S&P to taste, yet plausible territory now ...
Degrees of refinement and harmony of the elements to create the mood that you aspire to invoke are at your beckon call. Mask feathering, layer opacity adjustments etc. are all in play for taking your "crude" effort (as we all do at times, for expediency of concept /process) where your want it.
Hi Kent: This morning I looked at my LCD after each shot and compared it to the scene. In all cases I was happy with the color. This provided a reference for later. I also remembered to shoot a grey card and my McBeth when it got bright enough to see it. Not much use when it is still dark.
The full moon is so bright I can see without a flashlight. I am thinking for good stars, about a 1/2 moon is enough. That will still illuminate the scene and allow a darker sky and more visible stars. My first test shot looked like full daylight at ISO 800 and 30 seconds f2.8
