Background look yellow?

[kitkatdubs]

Does the background look yellow? I am having a hard time painting the whole wall white without it getting on the subjects. I tried the quick selection tool and then painted, but it looked too perfect and fake. Any other ways to paint the wall white without it getting on the subjects? Thanks!

 

[Ysarex]

Yes, the background looks yellow. Desaturate the background.

Joe

 

[tirediron]

Reshoot w/ better lighting?

 

[KmH]

Yep, the issue looks to be poor light quality and direction.
The solution is to use supplemental lighting you have more control over regards quality and direction(s)

If you keep subjects far enough away from the wall light won't reflect back on them.

The wall likely has a yellow cast for 2 reasons:
1. An incorrect white balance setting for the temperature of the light source.
2. I'm willing to bet you only used window light and light with a slightly different white balance color temperature fell on the wall compared with your subjects because of light's physical properties. Inverse-square law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Tim Tucker]

Use the selective colour tool in Photoshop to adjust the balance of the whites. You can do a quick mask select on the subjects which you can invert and reduce the density of so the highlights match the background without loosing the skin tones.

Not as good as getting the lighting right but probably the best and most targeted fix:

 

[kitkatdubs]

The front door is to the left of the subjects- just using natural light and also, their walls aren't white, I think maybe a grey/white ..

 

[kitkatdubs]

Use the selective colour tool in Photoshop to adjust the balance of the whites. You can do a quick mask select on the subjects which you can invert and reduce the density of so the highlights match the background without loosing the skin tones.

Not as good as getting the lighting right but probably the best and most targeted fix:

View attachment 127118

View attachment 127117

Wow looks really nice! If I sent you my edited version thus far, could you fix the background for me??

 

[Tim Tucker]

I assumed that you were using Photoshop/Elements (quick select tool) in which case it's remarkably simple (even easier than emailing ).

In Photoshop you can create a Selective Colour adjustment layer from Layer/New Adjustment Layer.

I used the quick select tool to select the subject which I did a rough adjust to. I saved the selection as the Selective Colour mask, then highlighted the mask in the Layers panel. This gives you the Mask properties and allows you to invert the mask and adjust the density if the mask. I set it to about 60% I think, so it took some of the yellow off the subject highlights but not make them too white.

In Selective Colour select the Whites from the 'colours' drop down menu. This adjusts the colour balance of the highlights only. The sliders are zeroed in the middle and can be thought of as +/- between the named colour and it's complementary hue.

This method is useful because you are only editing selected pixels, and because of that the adjustment is automatically feathered into the rest of the image. This is why the exact mask is not critical, because the adjustment only affects the highlights.

 

[KmH]

Yep, that fixed the background issues.

However, note the remaining subject white balance issues that likely resulted from mixed lighting - window light and incandescent/tungsten light.
The skin tones of both the guys has a distinct yellowish or orangeish cast, and the adult man's denim pants are grossly over-saturated.