Blue Tint

Greetings,

 

Last night after dinner we were strolling around and I took some shots as the

sun set. Please see the attached photo and notice how blue it looks. Can

anyone explain why it looks this way? I certainly don't recall the street

looking so blue.

 

The photo was taken with a Rebel XT and the standard 18-55 kit lens, RAW

format, IS0 400 (I wanted to try experimenting with different ISO speeds),

Shutter 1/125, F3.5, focal length 18mm, white balance auto. If there's any

other setting you'd like please let me know.

 

Thanks in advance for any feedback you can provide.<div></div>

At a guess it's the AWB. In the RAW converter try setting your own white point and see if that improves it...

Overcast skies or twilight conditions present us with a colour temperatures of around 7500K-10000K. <br>You shot this in the RAW format, so it will be quite easy to 'warm up' this shot to your personal taste.

How did you do the conversion from raw to jpg/tif? ...

 

Some converters choose the color temperature that was stored in the raw by the camera as starting point, others ignore this value completely and calculate their own WB.

 

Anyhow, you can change colortemperature in your rawconverter ...

simply go to a higher value and the picture will become "warmer".

Chances are good that the street was that blue. In shadows and especially after the sun is going down, the ambient light tends to be more blue than red.

 

Look at a white house that's in a big shadow. Or as the sun disappears. Don't just glance. Really, really look. It's blue. Our brains know that it's a white house, and so to a casual glance, we see the house as white regardless of what color it really appears to be.

 

 

Eric

If you have Photoshop, import the Raw, select the White balance tool eyedropper and select multiple points on the photo until you find one that represents a middle grey point - that will balance the colour to your liking.

 

Go back to the same (or any other) spot at sunrise, midday, sunset, cloudy sunset with the same settings and get to know light and your camera.

 

Take another photo that you think is normal, import it into PS and select the "cloudy" and "shade" white balance settings - notice how much red PS adds to compensate for the blue inherent in the shady settings. Try the same with this photo.

Getting the white balance correct in the camera is not easy. However PhotoShop can do an excellent job quite easily. In your case I went to levels and used the eyedropper to make the wall on the building on the right to a mid grey.<div></div>

I prefer the look of the before shot.

All,

 

Thanks for your replies I've learned a good bit from them. I did play around with the image some in DPP and LightRoom and found that I could tweak it easier using LightRoom.

another way to correct:

Copy the background layer in photoshop (ctrl+J) and then apply "filter/blur/average".

next select "Layer/new adjustment layer/curves".

below the "options" button on the curves properties pop-up there are 3 medicine droppers. pick the middle one and click anywhere in the blurred layer.

now click ok. hide the blurred layer (you can delete) and you're done.