Brown Hair Looks Purple

viola37 · Dec 29, 2010

I'm an amatuer/hobbist photographer and am having problems with brown hair looking purple in places. Below is a link to an example and I would love any help or tips anyone can give!

Thank you!

http://img683.imageshack.us/img683/4647/img51611.jpg

PerfectlyFlawed · Dec 29, 2010

I see purple-ish tints... or Blue... in the shiny area of the hair. Is that what your referring to?

PerfectlyFlawed · Dec 29, 2010

Maybe try warming it up a tad or adjusting the color levels?

RauschPhotography · Dec 29, 2010

Needs some warming. Her hair has a slight tint, as well as the white stripes on her shirt appear blue-ish.

viola37 · Dec 30, 2010

It thought it might help if I uploaded another one that is more obvious so here are a couple more examples:

http://img813.imageshack.us/img813/319/img3800.jpg

http://img46.imageshack.us/img46/936/img3723e.jpg

I'm not the best yet at having the image perfectly color balanced but when I play with warming it and making other adjustments the purple stays. And some of the hair looks just right so when I make adjustments for the purple then their real color of their hair starts to look weird.

bazooka · Dec 30, 2010

Both of these shots are pretty blue... warm them up and I bet it'll move toward brown.

RauschPhotography · Dec 30, 2010

viola37 said:
It thought it might help if I uploaded another one that is more obvious so here are a couple more examples:

http://img813.imageshack.us/img813/319/img3800.jpg

http://img46.imageshack.us/img46/936/img3723e.jpg

I'm not the best yet at having the image perfectly color balanced but when I play with warming it and making other adjustments the purple stays. And some of the hair looks just right so when I make adjustments for the purple then their real color of their hair starts to look weird.

Yet again, same issue. You'll also get more feedback if you post the pictures themselves in your posts.

viola37 · Dec 30, 2010

bazooka said:
Both of these shots are pretty blue... warm them up and I bet it'll move toward brown.

Here's one of the pictures warmed up and to me the purple coloring in her hair is worse. In reality her hair is brown/black.

http://img708.imageshack.us/img708/2662/img3723warm.jpg

Surely there's something wrong with images coming straight out of the camera with purple hair??? Is there something wrong with how I'm shooting or processing the raw image?

KmH · Dec 30, 2010

The slight blue cast is because you only used window light. Since the sky is blue, light from it has a blue cast.

Had you used flash as the dominant light source, the slight blue cast would have been overwhemed and not visible.

Part of the issue is underexposure of the hair.

Derrel · Dec 30, 2010

viola37 said:
bazooka said:

Both of these shots are pretty blue... warm them up and I bet it'll move toward brown.

Click to expand...

Here's one of the pictures warmed up and to me the purple coloring in her hair is worse. In reality her hair is brown/black.

http://img708.imageshack.us/img708/2662/img3723warm.jpg

Surely there's something wrong with images coming straight out of the camera with purple hair??? Is there something wrong with how I'm shooting or processing the raw image?

I do see that in the shot above, the mother's hair has a slight "warm" color bias to it--her shirt is BLACK, clearly BLACK...but her hair is not. One possible issue could be if she is coloring her hair...also, quite a few digital sensors exhibit a slight to a great deal of sensitivity to near-UV light waves...the Nikon D2h was a bad example...it rendered all sorts of normally "black" objects as a purple-ish black-ish color, much like the woman's hair.
In a situation like this, with a lot of the light coming from an open sky, it is interesting to note that the woman's hair is NOT 100 percent black, bu her shirt is rendered as black...so...it's not that the camera is incapable of rendering a black-black...

The Leica M-8 also suffered terribly from the same issue as the Nikon D2h, rendering myriad "black" objects with this odd, purple-ish/blackish coloration.