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Low light photography


john_holland3

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<p>Shooting low light music concerts with a Nikon D-60 with either a 50/1.8 or 105/2.8 Nikon lense with good results except for 1 venue which uses colored spotlights that produce a red tint on the performers. I've tried adjusting the white balance to no avail. Any suggestions on how to get rid of the red cast on my pics would be appreciated.</p><div>00Zh6L-421643584.thumb.jpg.beaf677e9b3b34fb766c9d2762f01787.jpg</div>
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<p>What software are you using? I'm using Lightroom and I believe that Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) in Photoshop and Photoshop Elements have similar, if not identical, controls. I pulled the Temp slider way down into the blues and the Tint slider way down into the greens. Then I adjusted the red, orange and yellow Hue, Saturation and Luminance sliders until I got the attached result.</p>

<p>There are many others here who are far more skilled than I who might stop by with better or more detailed advice.</p><div>00Zh6x-421659584.jpg.090487e44d71c198bb194c2bf129ba8f.jpg</div>

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<p>Trying to balance the lighting under multi-colored lights is nearly impossiblebut can be done. Not sure about Nikon cameras, but my Canon has something called <em>WB SHIFT</em>/<em>BKT </em> which lets you color correct a scene right inside the camera. It's like having a set of Color Correction filters. For example if the scene is too red then you would increase it's complementary color which is green right inside the camera. If your camera does not have that function, you can do the same in Post Processing. Photshop, Photoshop Elements and others, have various colored filters you can add to your image to correct white balance. Sometimes though it's better to leave well enough alone. The outrageous colors makes the scene look more natural. </p>
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It's impossible to get a -white- balance if your source of light has a spectrum that's too narrow, such as gelled spots. You can't make a relatively-pure red (or green, or yellow, or blue) behave like white light. After adjustments, you can change the hue and saturation of the dominant color of light, but you can't make it look white.
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<p>All you need to do is add the missing colour, in this case green.</p>

<p>The best way to do that is to open the image, make a new layer, fill it with green, then set blend mode to color, then adjust opacity down, I used a dark green and 20% opacity but take some time with both colour and opacity for each light source. I then white balanced off the writing on his pass strap. Obviously you can adjust his complexion to be accurate, I just guessed. Then simple noise and sharpen and here you are. This version might not be accurate, but the technique can get you there.</p><div>00ZhBT-421761684.jpg.000921afaa5942c11ed8cdb7678dd4ff.jpg</div>

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<p>Yeah, it's not easy alright, but the main thing getting in the way has nothing to do with subjectivity in taste for color. It can be done as others including myself demonstrated we got closer and closer to correcting for this.</p>

<p>The problem is the severity of the adaptive affect on the eyes trying to edit this out which is caused by the over saturated dominant primary red color. Not easy especially for getting correct looking skin tones that are lit by some type of colored light.</p>

<p>You can get a reasonable correct looking version. It just takes a bit of trial and error.</p>

<p>It's just colored tiny little squares called pixels folks. It's not some organic entity that can't be violated with software algorithms as if it was locked in essence within the image.</p>

<p>You should've seen the green climbing wall from a guy posting out of Australia looking for a similar correction posted in this forum. According to the OP...NAILED IT!</p>

<p>http://www.photo.net/beginner-photography-questions-forum/00YmG4</p>

<p>This is why IMO ACR is the swiss army knife of color editing tools.</p>

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As a point of reference, here's a photo that was also shot in low lighting (f2, 1/20s) at ISO 3200, but with a wider spectrum white light source (tungsten lights; color temp. is set to 3100). It's a bit warm, and they're rather drunk, but notice that the skin tones look normal.<div>00ZhXW-422075584.jpg.159ab8591a8710ee4fda197eb5be0db7.jpg</div>
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<p>So Mike, are you saying that's what skin should look like under that kind of light or are you saying the OP's image shouldn't or can't be fixed due to it not being able to match up to the way skin should appear in your posted sample?</p>

<p>I'm not sure what the OP wants, exposure/WB tips at the time of the shoot to prevent over cranked red from artificial lights to begin with or post processing tips to fix it as it is now.</p>

<p>Maybe I should make the skin in my last PP attempt more reddish orange to give the impression the subject is lit by some type of colored light and not try to make it look totally neutralized. </p>

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<p>Did you set the filter to "Tungsten to Daylight (3)"? I set it at around 90ish%... ColorEfex 3 Cross Balance Filter... try it again. I should also mention that I used curves to increase the contrast, it was pretty washed out after running through the filter. For the sake of the explanation, I'll post the photo after the filter, then after the contrast boost...</p><div>00Zhhx-422223584.jpg.bf574999f92f2ca4f993f14330f03b40.jpg</div>
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"So Mike, are you saying that's what skin should look like under that kind of light or are you saying the OP's image shouldn't or can't be fixed due to it not being able to match up to the way skin should appear in your posted sample?"

 

I'm saying that color corrections in Photoshop are not going to yield natural-looking skin when the image was shot with such a narrow spectrum of light because the color information needed to get a natural-looking result is simply not there. None of the edited images has natural-looking skin (well, maybe they look natural if you live in Zombieland).

 

I'm not arguing that all photos of people should have natural-looking skin. I shoot a lot of live music and a lot of people in bars/clubs with colored lights--I have thousands of images of people with unnatural skin colors. It's fine to use colors however you want. However, when you "correct" an image so that people have skin that's sort of close to the right color, but the tones and gradations are noticeably off, you end up with photos of zombies. It generally looks better (and requires less work) to have images of people who are obviously lit by colored lights.

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<p>Ryan ... Whoops... My error. I was about to ask if you started with the original image given in the 1st post in this thread, and then I discovered that *I* did not start with that image because I had some other adjustment layers active. My sincere apologies.</p>

<p>Tom M</p>

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<p>@Ryan and Tim - Yes, the CEP technique indeed worked quite well, at least for that particular type of gel/light source. Thanks for pointing it out. I will have to see how well it (and the other filters in that group) work with other gels.</p>

<p>FWIW, here is the result of two passes with that CEP (Color Effects Pro) filter and a bit of touch-up work on the skin. It's interesting to see how the quality of the color fix has improved throughout this thread.</p>

<p>Cheers,</p>

<p>Tom M</p><div>00ZhrR-422425584.jpg.e42d699172038675393f1710dffdebd2.jpg</div>

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