greenish tint

[ericande]

I was out shooting photos the other night and I was trying to play around with the following photo. I mostly like it but the lights are casting a weird greenish glow. I've tried different white balance settings (I have the raw for this also) but I can't get rid of the greenish tint without making it all look very unnatural. Can anyone help edit this to make it look more "warm" but natural and tell me how you did it?

Thanks!

 

[burtharrris]

All lights give off different color light, and the problem with outdoor lighting is that there are a million different types. You have no real method but guess and check. The problem with a lot of them is that they give a greenish tint, like this one. Try to use a fluorescent white balance, that might help with the greenish tint.

 

[fmw]

It sounds like you are trying to adjust WB in the camera. Put the RAW into Photoshop and adjust white balance in the levels screen. You should be able to nail it.

 

[burtharrris]

Now that i'm actually sober I edited it a little. I'm not a pro at this; I've only been using CS2 on and off for a month or so. I'm sure someone could make one better, but here's my quick attempt:

cyan/red: -100
magenta/green: -50
yellow/blue: +50

 

[fmw]

Way too hard. just go to the levels screen, take the white picker and click it on the street light. Bingo. Then if you want to adjust color after that, it is a different matter.

 

[burtharrris]

Way too hard. just go to the levels screen, take the white picker and click it on the street light. Bingo. Then if you want to adjust color after that, it is a different matter.

Like I said, someone can do it better than me.

Thanks Fred, you learn something new everyday. Luckily I got mine over with at 9am.

 

[Majik Imaje]

.. .. which is expressed in degress Kelvin.

It has noting to do with heat but color of that light!

I mentioned ths to a room full of electricans and that statement caused full scale war!

tungsten light is 2800 degrees kelvin the color not the temperature as in heat.

just like the longittue and lattitude is measured in degees,

and when we bend pipe it must be measured in degrees.

The kelvin scale is somewhat difficult to understand at first glance.

but basicllly sunlight is 5500 degrees Kelivn flourescenet it either warm or cool cool white is 4,000 degrees Kelvin.
Most manufactures of lamps have kelvin ratings. Ask at any electrical supply house or look it up on line by manufactures , Westinghouse, G.E.
greybar elec. Eagle elec. should have all the info you need.

Once you recognize what type light your working with, then you can use the appropriate filter, but I have no idea on digital and RAW but it seems to already be covered in great detail.

 

[burtharrris]

Once you recognize what type light your working with, then you can use the appropriate filter, but I have no idea on digital and RAW but it seems to already be covered in great detail.

Majik, digital systems use electronics to balance color temperature, not filters. I don't mind it at all, because it's cheaper and I don't have to carry around a pouch full of filters!

 

[fmw]

.. .. which is expressed in degress Kelvin.

It has noting to do with heat but color of that light!

I mentioned ths to a room full of electricans and that statement caused full scale war!

tungsten light is 2800 degrees kelvin the color not the temperature as in heat.

just like the longittue and lattitude is measured in degees,

and when we bend pipe it must be measured in degrees.

The kelvin scale is somewhat difficult to understand at first glance.

but basicllly sunlight is 5500 degrees Kelivn flourescenet it either warm or cool cool white is 4,000 degrees Kelvin.
Most manufactures of lamps have kelvin ratings. Ask at any electrical supply house or look it up on line by manufactures , Westinghouse, G.E.
greybar elec. Eagle elec. should have all the info you need.

Once you recognize what type light your working with, then you can use the appropriate filter, but I have no idea on digital and RAW but it seems to already be covered in great detail.

To be accurate, tungsten lighting has a color temperature that can be measured and corrected with filters. Other forms of lighting like flourescent do not. They produce a color cast to be sure but the light output can't be measured on the Kelvin scale (which does have something to do with temperature by the way-even with color temperature.) Those color casts were impossible to correct completely with film and were handled mostly by trial, error and experience in the film days.

The advantage of digital white balance is that it isn't hampered by color temperature. It works strictly on color so it is easy to correct color casts produced by lighting that has no color temperature such as the lights in the OP's post.

 

[w.pasman]

If I get you right, the rest of the scene has right WB, only the lights themselves are wrong?

That's possible: the lights probably are overexposed and one of the channels (probably red) got clamped at its highest values.

I would suggest to select only the lights and to an additional *artificial* hue correction on them. Maybe you can just clamp them to some reddish teint matching the color you are expecting there. I say artificial because the overexposure causes artificial color casts which you can not correct by doing an overall change in WB.

 

[w.pasman]

I think using the right filter MIGHT avoid color casts in overexposed parts like this. But the ""proper"" filter would cast these lights to white, and the rest of the scene would be white instead of reddish, requiring you to still use a post-processing step to get the scene back from white to the reddish that you want here.

 

[RacePhoto]

I see a number of problems here. Not you but the lighting. First off the outside light could be sodium vapor or some monochromatic light. The inside lights could be incandescent in the hallway and floursecent in the rooms. Second, I only have photoshop 6 and I don't know how to use it. I don't know what light is illuminating the side of the bike we can see, not what's in the background... it could be yet a 4th color temperature. Did you use flash fill? Light color #5!

I did levels, did the white dropper and clicked on the little flare of white on the oil tank. Clicked on black and clicked on part of the dark in the shadows on the side, front of the engine.

Then I did some color balance by eye. Seems to me the problem was way too much Red in the picture. I added 100% blue, took the red down, adjusted the green down a little.

It looks like a time exposure, which starts to get those soft greenish hues.

Someone who knows what they are doing could do much better. Just for example, quick and dirty...

 

[Aquarium Dreams]

I like racephoto's version.

And maybe this pegs me as inexperienced, but I like all the different colors of light at night you can capture at night, and how they can transform a scene into something surreal. That said, the color is overwhelming on the original, and my very noobish way of coping with that would be the hue/saturation sliders, but I'm also just learning the power of levels and curves, so I will try Fred's eye dropper technique in the future..

And by the future, I mean right now! I have some night photos I have to edit. Perfect timing.

 

[ericande]

Wow, resurrected. I actually went back there and shot a couple more. Basically there are 3 different temps there, all 3 light sources are quite a bit different. I did get a much better shot though, which I can't post right now because I'm switching servers.