Icky color

I shot a couple of hundred available light photos over the holidays, with a 85 1.8 lens at ISO 1600. I used AWB white balance, mostly because I was going to change them to B&W anyway. Still, I thought you might want to check out the icky color and a "correction" I did using Curves (with a tweaked white balance in Auto) I set the white balance for the curves command using a trick I read about in the book The PhotoShopCS book for Digital Photographers, then applied the curves to just the saturation channel. Better than the original, but still pretty icky. I used the white wall behind her as a reference point. Skin tones still don't look right, though.

Hi Steve,

If I recall correctly, you're one of the many men with color blindness of some sort. The colors in the corrected version look horrible. Really horrible. I doubt the wall is as white as you think it is (probably off white/creamish).

The AWB didn't do too good of a job in the original. It still looks like tungsten lighting. Usually cameras these days do better with that. You're not shooting with a D30 still are you? That camera wasn't the best for AWB.

Trevor

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Trevor Ash

Hi Steve,

If I recall correctly, you're one of the many men with color blindness of some sort. The colors in the corrected version look horrible. Really horrible. I doubt the wall is as white as you think it is (probably off white/creamish).

The AWB didn't do too good of a job in the original. It still looks like tungsten lighting. Usually cameras these days do better with that. You're not shooting with a D30 still are you? That camera wasn't the best for AWB.

Trevor

---

I have awful color vision. I can't see sh** as far as color is concerned. I rely on the digital camera to get it right, which it mostly does with sunny and flash photos. That's why I am changing these to B&W. Still, it is an interesting experiment. I shot some in RAW mode, and changed them to tungsten, and they look pretty good to me. .

I have a 10D, and this is what AWB came up with.

Seems like the farther you get from 5000k daylight color temperature, the worse auto white balance does. This is probably 2500-2800k, and since it's a long ways off from daylight the colors don't look right. I've noticed that with both my Nikon and Fuji, but no Canon experience. I think the photo filter adjustment in Photoshop would do a better job here, try an 80A filter and adjust the slider to maybe 20%.

Color correction should be done based on the most important area of the shot, in this case the skin tone. Doesn't matter so much what the wihdow looks like, but I understand why you used it.

Here is one shot with a custom white balance on the wall. This looks ok to me.

maybe its my screen, but it looks really blue

Yeah, seems to be lacking red. Maybe there's something else going on here? Color profile/workspace problems?

Really blue, actually bluish-green...

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Stephen Lutz

Here is one shot with a custom white balance on the wall. This looks ok to me.

---

Steve-
That is cyan as all hell. You need to hire a color correcter ;)

Switching to black and white would be a good idea for you. If you want color and a shot is important, consider using a custom white balance. That would likely make a huge difference for these photos.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Photo-John

Steve-
That is cyan as all hell. You need to hire a color correcter ;)

Switching to black and white would be a good idea for you. If you want color and a shot is important, consider using a custom white balance. That would likely make a huge difference for these photos.

---

it is messy but using the eyedropper to set the white point on the levels pallette should do the trick for you. otherwise like john said hire a colour corrector. at least that is one good point about film. the labs screen staff for colour blindness (in theory at least) and so whilst minor increments may be made to suit the labs personal taste the colours should be pretty accurate. of course with slide this is even more true. one day i will get it tested but the world looks warmer (like an 81b filter) from my left eye to my right eye.