Incandesant Mistake !!!!

[Freddy2]

I have some crucial images here that where shot by mistake outdoors with the indoor incandesant bulb setting. Has anyone any ideas on how to bring these images back to an acceptable normal color. Im afraid they were not taken in raw .

[Tom V]

I would try to adjust the color in Photoshop with the Color Balance Sliders or Curves or Levels. Photoshop 7 (and probably CS (v8)) have a pretty good Auto Levels function that frequently works well. If you get an image corrected, you can write down or save the settings and apply them to all your affected images. You could even make an action using the saved settings to automatically adjust all your images.

Post a sample of the mis-shot image, and I can give it a try, and tell you what settings I come up with.

All is not lost - yet.

[Freddy2]

Thanks for your reply, I have tried that but had not great success Id hoped there might be another way, I have attached a reduced copy of one of the images, see what you think

[Freddy2]

I dont think the attachment went in the last reply , trying again

[crabby]

In the Curves menu, the middle eyedropper isn't for setting the midtone value, it is for gray balancing. It works great, but the hard part is finding a truely neutral gray in your scene. At the very least, it's a good starting point that can be fine tuned with individual curves.

[crabby]

OK, I tried a quick fix using the method I described. Eye droppered his jacket in different places til I got something close, then fine tuned the red and blue channels. Still wasn't happy so I converted to LAB color and tweeked the a & b channels. Not bad but couldn't do anything about blowned highlights.

[Tom V]

Freddy,

I took your image and made a duplicate layer, which I gaussian blurred 2 pixels. The blurred copy layer allows me to use the eyedropper without crazy fluxuations caused by noise (random color pixels). I also set the eyedropper preference to use a 5x5 pixel sample. I made my adjustment layer(s) over the blurred copy layer. I tried a Levels Adjustment (so so), a Color Balance Adjustment (good), and a Curves Adjustment (best) - each one at a time, not cumulative. After I get done with doing adjustments (or at least using the eyedropper, I delete the blurred copy layer).

With the Levels Adjustment, I move the sliders under the histogram to see where the lightest and darkest tones are that I want to worry about. I picked a spot on the bride's shoulder strap for a white highlight, and a spot on the groom's jacket vent shadow for a black shadow. I used a spot on his shoulder to set the gray balance. It looked better, but not fantastic. Doing it this way seemed to lose a lot of detail in the highlights and shadows.

Next I tried Curves. I used the dropper tool to get a basic set of curves, and the results were like those from Levels. However, I could readjust the curve tips to not flatten out so I could retain what detail might be there. The hardest thing was to get the light skin tones to loose the red cast without losing detail (may be impossible). I was able to get the individual channel curves pretty good, and then I used the overall RGB curve to flatten the contrast a bit. I saved the curve settings, and they can be quickly applied to other images with the same results.

Download the "WeddingCurve.acv" file (I hope I can post it here. If not, I will put it on the web and will provide the link). In your Curves Adjustment dialog box, click on LOAD to find the curve file you downloaded and apply it. You can adjust it further if you wish.

Looking at the curves, you can see that the incandescent lighting WB maximizes blue and minimizes red, and my curves counteract that. The magenta-green curve is not adjusted nearly as much. If you had shot with a fluorescent WB setting, the Green channel would need a lot of emphasis. This makes me think that adjusting curves in L*A*B color space might be appropriate excersize.

Next I tried Color Balance. I set the same numbers in each of the Shadows', Midtone', and Highlights' sliders. I used +25 0 -25 for each.

You might try the Color Balance as above, but use less (+15 0 -15) in the Shadows and Highlights to retain a little more detail.

The attached image is using the Curves Adjustment.

[Tom V]

I shall try to attach the "WeddingCurve.acv" file. - and it didn't work. Here is the link to it in my hack webspace: http://users.myexcel.com/tomvoegeli/curve/

If you cannot make the color presentable on the majority of your images, maybe you can convert them to black and white, perhaps black and white with a tone. There are several ways to convert a color image to black and white, some with better or much better results than others.

Good luck!

[Freddy2]

Tom and Crabby

Many many thanks for your time and effort!!I am definately a few steps closer to solving the problem , I owe you both a pint of guinness when your next in Ireland.

Regards

Freddy

[Swampy]

This probably won't help you, but Photoshop CS has these Filters. So, here's what I did:

Warmth filter (85) @64%
red Filter @9%
deep blue @10%
Then, sample a part of her dress in levels with the white dropper, adjusted levels slightly. Then I can't get out of the habit, but sharpened a little. Maybe too much now. Doh. But... Here's my result.

I could get it warmer, but it started to really blow out the whites bad. :\

[Eddie the Gnat]

Here's my tuppence worth:

Levels (lots of playing around & fading results)
Hue/saturation.
(cropping as well)

Eddie.


p.s. Bad luck, but at least you'll never do it again:)

[sandman]

May as well have a go as well . only got elements so i have'nt the depths all of you have so.
duplicated layer. Converted to B&W. increased the green channel on the base layer, reduced the opacity of the 2nd layer to 50%.
selected her eyes increased the blue , applied light USM. flattened image .
The foreground whites are badly blown out , so eddy's cropping is a good idea , Toms P.S. work again is brilliant .

Brian

[Andre]

I couldn't resist having a go at it...

[psychronos]

Correcting colour temperature involves a lot of trial and error, especially with jpegs (and raw is no wonder drug either). With this image the most important issue I think would be the skin tone reproduction, so I tried to tackle that first.

After trying to adjust the overall colour temperature of the image using curve and colour balance, the highlights and shadows are still tinted, so I used replace colour and tried to isolate that spectrum and matching it with the skin tone. I did the same thing with other highlights or shadows that looked odd.

The colours are still not perfect, but acceptable, and to further mess with the palette would result in more visible posterisations (you can already see it in the skin tone transitions) So I left it at that. Trying to maintain the original contrast I used a luminosity layer copied from the original on top of the adjusted results.

I dodge the skin tone a little to reduce the contrast, but there are still un-natural hues on the faces which can be helped by selecting those areas and matching it with skin tone using replace colour.

So like I said before, it's basically playing with all the tools you have and finding the optimum result that pleases you, of course one could always hand touch the entire image to get a much better result, but it is very time consuming process and involves a lot more previsualisation than ansel adams had ever imagined.

[turbo-944]

Here's a quick stab using Icorrect Editlab, Photoshop's Hue/Saturation, Color Balance and Levels.

Dan.

[MASH]

Used colorwash -- temperature adjusted to 7200 K and then reduced blue tinge using levels blue channel only.

[Linda G]

I couldn't resist trying my hand and am wondering what it'll look like once posted here, they are not always the same as they are in Photoshop, but here goes.

Is colorwash a software program or a method I'm not familiar with? That looks pretty good if it didn't take very long. (thinking of zillions of images that need a quick fix)

For my rendition, I used levels to bring down the highlights using the bar on the bottom, sliding the right arrow to the left SLIGHTLY.

I then used the color balance to add red and yellowin the medium and shadow areas, then selected the skin tones to play some more as I found the trees and dress going funky colors.

Linda

[Roger Ele]

Here is my try,

-Duplicated image, changed duplicate to LAB mode.

-Returned to original image, selected blue channel, used Apply Image to paste lightness channel from duplicate image into blue channel, multply mode.

-Working image, Background layer selected. ctrl-alt-~ to select luminosity. cntrl-J to copy via layer, changed new layer to multipy mode.

-Curves adjustment layer to nuetralize white and black points, then adjusted blue channel in curves to subtract blue at mid point.

-Added a little saturation

Hope this helps,
Roger

[Linda G]

I have a question for the original photographer.

We've all worked to 1. get useable skin tones and 2. keep the dress white and 3. save the blown out highlights.

What color are the flowers? On our corrected images here we have everything from lilac to fuchia. :) Just curious.

Linda

[MASH]

The program is actually called color washer. Capable of a lot of fine adjustments to color. They have a companion program called Focalblade that is a great focusing tool, as well.

Both are photoshop plugins.

[pcerq]

You can always convert your photo to B&W.

regards,


Pedro Cerqueira
-----------------------------
http://www.pcerq.com
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[amorin]

Steps:

1-Manually adjusted Levels
2-Two iterations of Color Mechanics Pro to remove casts and increase saturation in Greens (leaves), orange (hair), pinks (flowers), and blues (flowers)
3- Variations (darken midtones and shadows)
4- Sharpened to taste

[scottjua]

five minute fix... can bbe made alot nicer...but that takes some more time in curves...

[scottjua]

per suggesiton above...same file with blue channel adjusted:

[Chris M.]

Converted it, adjusted brightness/contrast, sharpened using unsharp mask, cropped, blurred outside edges to center attention on bride and groom. If I had more time, I would have burned/dodged highlights. Really need the full image file to work with.

[jeffinkansas]

I also had to try.

Did some layer stuff, then desaturated the dress. Face was not doing what I wanted so I created a new layer with orange droped it on top, painted their faces and highlights, then droped the opacity. Oh yeah and I definately think you should crop, and get rid of that fron foliage. Just more trouble than its worth this time. Hope this helps. I also sharpened, cause the color layer blurred things a little.

[jknights]

Sorry, I know this doesn't really help the current situation but it reinforces the value of using RAW/RAF files over JPG.

This would have been a breeze with a RAF shot !!

[jknights]

I had a go in Photoshop but I couldn't match the results already posted.
I found that if I got the skin tones and foliage corect the dress was completely blown as far as detail goes and if I got the dress right then the skin tones and foliage were horrible.

I think the B&W conversion is very interesting as it shows that here is a lot of detail in the image but in color it is lost.

My vote for the best color rendition (I don't know what the real situation colors were) goes to 'psychronos' product but everybody has done a great job trying to recover this.:)

[easternherp]

I think you taht you will have to accept that you won't get an even colour for the wedding but you will have to play around with photoshop until you get a colour you like.
Here's my try