I HATE THEM WITH MY WHOLE SOUL

minicoop1985 · Mar 20, 2015

High pressure sodium street lights, that is.

G8 lighting experiment by longm1985, on Flickr

I know what I did wrong. I need ONE backplate exposure instead of including the background in every shot. I seriously hate these things so much.

MikeFlorendo · Mar 21, 2015

I hate them too but it's an easy fix if you just use the individual color slider and I used the orange and yellow and lessen the the saturation and messed with the luminescent. Just a 30 second edit but if you mess with it you can get what you prefer. The car color maybe a little off now but like I said I didn't play with it that long and you can use the red slider to adjust the car.

fjrabon · Mar 21, 2015

I love them, myself, but also if you hate them, this is why they invented gels for your flash. You just gel your flash so that it matches the shade of lights (any good gel kit will have a sodium vapor colored gel). Then shoot a white balance shot, and voila, your problem is completely fixed.

Light source color cast is only an issue if you're mixing different colors of light (like regular ungelled flash and sodium vapor ambient). If all your light is the same color, you can fix it however you like.

rexbobcat · Mar 21, 2015

Ooooooo Photoshop challenge. Honestly, I don't think it's the difference in temperature of those lights vs my flash as much as it is the...color in general: a sickly yellow with a hint of green. Very rarely have I seen photos where those lights - at their native temperature - complement the subject.

Here's my attempt. It's probably a bit bland and the background might be a little too desaturated. Working with colors in JPEG is hard, okay... ;_;

Also; your photo is in Adobe RGB. Just a heads up, since that can cause it to appear washed out on the web.

fjrabon · Mar 21, 2015

rexbobcat said:
Ooooooo Photoshop challenge. Honestly, I don't think it's the difference in temperature of those lights vs my flash as much as it is the...color in general: a sickly yellow with a hint of green. Very rarely have I seen photos where those lights - at their native temperature - complement the subject.

Here's my attempt. It's probably a bit bland and the background might be a little too desaturated. Working with colors in JPEG is hard, okay... ;_;

Also; your photo is in Adobe RGB. Just a heads up, since that can cause it to appear washed out on the web.

View attachment 97445

Sure, the ultimate problem is the yellow light. But it's only a problem because if you try to fix it, it makes the rims ultra blue looking. If the flash was also yellowed out, the fix is just as simple as sliding the white balance slider on the raw file until it "looks right" (or better yet taking a white balance shot and then setting a custom WB)