civilized ku # 2448 ~ let there be (balanced) light
Monday, January 14, 2013 at 05:21PM ;)
Night fog ~ Au Sable Forks, NY - in the Adirondack Park • click to embiggenIMO, night picture making, under some circumstances, is one of the most difficult to proccess, color wise. Those such circumstances are when there are multiple artificial light sources, each with differing white balance points. Multiple color balances, if left uncorrected (individually), tend to result in a somewhat garish potpourri of disjointed colors in a print of the scene.
My solution to such cases, as in the picture with this entry, is to process the image as many times as there are different color balance sources, correcting each color source to a more correct color balance - in the Night fog picture, there were 3 predominant light sources so I processed the image 3x, one corrected file for each area of the scene dominated by a different light source. Then I merged the separate corrected areas of the picture into one composite file which resulted in a much more real representation of the scene.
Doing so is slightly time consuming but, IMO, the result is well worth the effort.
Reader Comments (5)
Nice detail but still soft, very nice.
Heh. Just came back from walking the dog during which I thought to myself I should make a plan to do some picturing tonight after dark - something I've been meaning to do for a while. Returned and found this post. Good processing suggestion - I'll keep that in mind.
Good image ... has a certain "crispness" to it ... makes my eye want to explore the different nooks and crannies portrayed.
Yes, I've been paying more attention to colour casts and have recently decided to "up my game" by recognising and correcting for multiple colour casts. I've been using PS layers + masks to handle the different areas / referents in the image.
This is time consuming and I was wondering if I was doing the right thing, but I now realise you go through the same process as well.
How did photographers get it right back in the days of film?
I've mentioned it before, but I appreciate you repeating these technical / aesthetic issues in your posts. Eventually the importance of these ideas sink in and I do something about it in my own images.
What I like is that each light source looks balanced but still retains the appropriate hint of color expected from that source. The streetlight has a hint of yellow (sodium or incandescent?) the light spilling into the road from the storefront is cooler (florescent perhaps?). The overall effect is it looks correct, but not artificially so.
I like this technique and I've used something similar in the past before. Since using Lightroom I've been using the Adjustment brush and making local color balance changes using the sliders and brushing where necessary after making an initial color balance change to the entire photo. It takes a bit of practice but it's non-destructive and you can always make a change at any time.