How To Remove Weird Colours

[stephan00]

Dear fellow CRs.

A few days ago I attended a concert in a small bar in town and, my GF happening to be a fan of the artist, took quite some photos (50 1.2). I checked every now and then for the colour and continued shooting happily, because I couldn't see any problems on the camera screen (5DIII).

Imagine my dismay when, after importing the photos into lightroom they came out like the first one. The vignetting at 1.2 doesn't bother me at all, but the sick purple of the face is not at all likeable.

In a first attempt to repair the damage, I moved the sliders for purple to -21 (colour), -50 (saturation) and -33 (luminance), and moved the second slider for the whitebalance to -90, which resulted in the second photo. It is already much better, but still not really good. In addition to the still purplish face, the shadows are sort of red-orange.

There was a spotlight, directed at his head and upper torso, which I suspect to be the reason for this, but the colours are far from the ones seen with the naked eye and on the rear screen.

For the third photo I moved the saturation slider for orange to -78, to get rid of the orange shadows on his face and neck. This is now already again much better, but still not perfect.

In my desperation, I converted the frame to b/w (last photo), and while this is something I can live with (actually, I will probably live with the third one, if necessary), I would like to ask if anybody has got a better solution, which I could use for one photo and then copy to the others. Maybe there is none and this is simply the reason why so many concert photos are in b/w

I don't have photoshop or anything like it, just lightroom 4.3. And you can tell, I'm not really familiar with all its details and features

Any hints, tips, ideas most welcome

Thanks,
Stephan

 

[distant.star]

.
You haven't mentioned white balance or vibrance.

Have you altered either in LR?

I'm presuming you shot RAW so you'll have WB to play with.

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

The simple fact is that the face has little or no red and green. You need red and green to alter the hue.
It might be possible to add red and green in photoshop using masking and layers, but, since you don't have photoshop, that's not a solution.

 

[stephan00]

@distant.stat: I did mention wb (yes, shooting raw), I moved the second slider (not the temperature one) to -90.

@mt spokane: that's what I suspected, nay, feared

I guess, I'll have to live with it. And the correction of the colours of course produced a yellow cast on the walls; still, better than that purple face, I gather.

Still, I'm a bit surprised that this massive purple didn't show up on the screen. After all, that's supposed to be the jpg-preview, isn't it? I just dropped my stuff off for service today, but once I get it back, I'll have another look at it.

 

[Sella174]

You're fiddling too much with the wrong settings. This looks like a pure white balance issue (probably within LR). Question: What does the imbedded JPEG look like?

 

[stephan00]

This is the embedded jpg as seen in irfanview

 

[distant.star]

@distant.stat: I did mention wb (yes, shooting raw), I moved the second slider (not the temperature one) to -90.

Sorry, but I meant the Temp slider -- the one that goes from 2000 to 50,000. You may not be able to get it right with a global adjustment. You may have to paint specific WB into the affected areas, but I'd be surprised if it can't be fixed in LR. I've shot those kind of lighting conditions and rarely had a picture that couldn't be made reasonably compliant.

Actually, I like the B&W version, except for the mic hiding too much of his face.

 

[Sella174]

This is the embedded jpg as seen in irfanview

Thanks. I see you had the in-camera WB set to "Tungsten" and I think therein lies the problem. Mmmmm ... the EXIF data seems to be corrupt.

 

[Fuhrtographer]

Did you try clicking on his white shirt with the eye dropper/white balance tool? If you try this I would zero out all the color adjustments you made and you have to do it on the original RAW file.white balance tutorial

 

[stephan00]

@ distant.star: agree on the mike, I have got plenty of other pics with his face visible, but happened to pick a bad example for this thread.

@ fuhrtographer: I did try with the eye dropper, first thing, but it kept telling me that this was not a proper place to obtain the reading for the white balance from. I went back and tried some more, and after ten tries I hit a spot where LR no longer complained. Here's the result, with just a touch of dimming the lights and reducing the overall exposure.

@ Sella174: exif-data are the following: f/1.2, 1/80 s, ISO 1250

[edit:] Thanks for the tips. This looks much better now, better than everything but the b/w one, actually

 

[Sella174]

@ Sella174: exif-data are the following: f/1.2, 1/80 s, ISO 1250

Canon cameras record lots more EXIF data than that, including the computed colour temperature.

 

[jrista]

@ distant.star: agree on the mike, I have got plenty of other pics with his face visible, but happened to pick a bad example for this thread.

@ fuhrtographer: I did try with the eye dropper, first thing, but it kept telling me that this was not a proper place to obtain the reading for the white balance from. I went back and tried some more, and after ten tries I hit a spot where LR no longer complained. Here's the result, with just a touch of dimming the lights and reducing the overall exposure.

@ Sella174: exif-data are the following: f/1.2, 1/80 s, ISO 1250

[edit:] Thanks for the tips. This looks much better now, better than everything but the b/w one, actually

You need to do direct color channel editing to fix this. I assume you have Lightroom. Lightroom has extensive color editing capabilities. You should be able to pretty narrowly define just the range of purples that you want to adjust, and tweak them.

 

[stephan00]

Oh dear, you must think I'm a complete idiot , but up to now I've never had the need for specific colour corrections in lightroom!

So I played around withe the slider, and lo and behold! the wollen cap is grey again

Thanks to you, and I'll go now and sit down with the lightroom-description and learn it by heart

 

[jrista]

Glad to be of service. Most of the time, the discovery of how powerful LR's color channel editing is surprises people...so you aren't alone. Your just part of the masses. ;P

 

[stephan00]

That's one of the reasons I like this forum a lot. Apart from the amusing (for a bystander) flame-wars about DR and such, one can find people like you and neuro and the usual suspects who are taking the time and patiently explain things a ten-year old would know to a halfwit like me ;D (not counting the times where I learned a lot just by reading the questions of others)

A BIG thanks to all of you!

 

[flowers]

Answer: UV

It's not showing incorrectly, it's showing correctly! That's ultraviolet light. I assume the mk iii can see it as well as the mk ii. The mk ii can see UV light better than any other camera I've used! Unfortunately it only sees a limited portion of it, and renders it as magenta. It can't see lower than 350-360nm or something like that. I'm surprised you didn't see it on the screen, it shows clearly on the screen! I should not that most people should be able to see most of what the camera sees, do you remember the UV light lighting on the guy? If not, you have a strange brain! Since UV is rendered as magenta by the camera, magenta->green should fix the problem! edit: oops, it's not quite that simple, but play around with the sliders til you get an acceptable result!

 

[silvestography]

I'm primarily a concert shooter so I see this a lot.

Try playing with the Camera Calibration module - sometimes pushing reds towards yellow and desaturating them can make a difference, as well as bringing up the saturation in the green channel and playing around with the blues.

Alternatively, go black and white and don't worry about it!

 

[Sella174]

Re: Answer: UV

It's not showing incorrectly, it's showing correctly! That's ultraviolet light.

Mmmmm ... I wonder if a UV filter would ... erm ... filter it out.

 

[flowers]

Re: Answer: UV

It's not showing incorrectly, it's showing correctly! That's ultraviolet light.

Mmmmm ... I wonder if a UV filter would ... erm ... filter it out.

A good UV filter should! Be aware though that cheaper filters (and some UV filters in general) only it cut down the deeper UV while having no effect on the visible violet wavelengths (around 370-400nm), so make sure the UV filter extends high up enough if you want to use it for that purpose! I think it's good that way because then it keeps violets deep violet and roses deep red, but it's not useful for cutting out visible UV from a blacklight!

 

[jrista]

Guys, modern cameras have a UV filter built into them, part of the low pass filter stack (along with an IR Cut filter.) You don't need to filter UV. The light was probably your standard fluorescent blacklight. Cheap blacklights include a considerable amount of deep violet visible light. There isn't a UV cutoff issue here...the camera just picked up the deep violet visible light, which human eyes are naturally rather insensitive to. Thats all!