Removing strong red casts in Lightroom

A

Andyman

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Andy Reed
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Hi,

I had a real nightmare of a shoot the other week which I managed to recover in Lightroom but I’m wondering whether there was a better way to resolve the issue.

The problem I had was that the event I shot had no lighting technician. So the sound guy set the lights to a horrible red and left it there throughout. I shot in RAW and managed to recover to something deliverable for the client by applying a complete coverage adjustment brush of 100% green. So I got from this...

AR05051029-before.jpg


To this...
AR05051029-after.jpg


The before shot is actually how it looked. Not very flattering and not something I could have delivered.

My question. Is there a better way to resolve this in Lightroom?

Incidentally, I managed to ask the sound guy if he could change the lights to something more neutral. He switched the red lights to green. :shake: Same problem different cast.

Much appreciated,
Andy.
 
Did you shoot raw or JPG? Lightroom should be able to pull most of the cast out of a RAW with a white balance adjustment (and you've got a good white reference point on the singer's blouse).
 
Step 1 would be to sell your TT :) Sorry, back on topic now please. It seems I just found am old friend on TP :)
 
Oi. I've fit more posts than you! Anyway, sorry to hijack the thread, will give you a buzz later. Back to red cast removal everyone!
 
You could use the colour picker in the treatment pane in the develop module. You can either point the eye dropper on a neutral part of the image or run it over various parts of the image until it looks OK in the navigator window.

You may need to make some additional adjustments as I find the picker tends to give a cool result to that which I prefer.
 
Andy

Had a look at the original in LR. I can see your problem. I used the eyedropper and got a reasonable result, but it was still magenta. I had the tint slider all the way to green and the temperature control at maximum as well. I can see how much of a problem you have. I tried using the targeted adjustment tool to drop the magenta bias, but whilst an improvement it's not great.

I can't think of an easy answer to this one

John C
 
Andy I had a thought. If the lighting was consistent you could have perhaps used a colorchecker passport to have taken a reference shot at the beginning and then let their software fix your colours. There are some recordings of the webinars which show you what it can do at the x-rite web site. Would only work if the lighting was consistent though.
 
Is it possible that there was a red/purple spot light gel in operation?
 
tiler65 said:
Is it possible that there was a red/purple spot light gel in operation?
Click to expand...

More than possible I would say. They were the only key lights in operation. Horrible lighting for sure.

It was perfectly consistent as the lighting booth wasn't even manned. I basically fixed the first one and then synced the adjustments to all. It sounds as though my approach wasn't far off. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing a trick.

Thanks Amir. I'll have a look at Colourchecker Passport. I haven't heard of that one.

Cheers,
Andy.
 
I have the Colorchecker passport.

A useful little tool
 
with something like this you have 3 choices

1. white balance your camera, shoot what's there, and deliver what you shoot (the reality)
2. white balance your camera, shoot what's there work like a dog in PP, and deliver a less colour cast version (un-reality)
3. convert it to B&W
 
Andyman said:
My question. Is there a better way to resolve this in Lightroom?
Click to expand...

In my experience you can try a few different approaches (mix them to achieve best results).

1) Get yourself untwisted profiles for your camera - Adobe profiles that come with LR and ACR have a nasty way of shifting the colours and untwisting them removes this. That should take care of reddish cast in quite a few cases. Just google for untwisted LR profiles.

2) Calibrate your camera in that light (using free Adobe profiler) - shoot CC24 under that light and run it through their profiler. Not sure if you have access to that lighting to reproduce it though so this may not be viable approach.

3) Use the Calibration panel (the bottom one) in Development module to adjust hues/saturations. This is the most flexible approach but it's long and tedious - I don't find it easy to use at all but in the end it could be the last resort.
 
Pretty difficult to clean up completely but I've had a go.

AR05051029-Edit001.jpg


All they needed was a little OW face light from the front and it would have looked so much better.
 
This is the best I could come up with straight out of my Raw converter spending 10 min on it (no PS except for downsizing), not sure it it is satisfactory enough as it is a particually awkward image colour cast wise.

125049474.jpg
 
That looks good to me Paul. Well done - it's a very difficult one!
 
Nice work OlyPaul, my only gripe is that if there was a coloured spotlight his face would be a different colour so why does it need changing.

Maybe I am just not used to music lighting.
 
The lighting in the original picture looked pretty dreadful - the OP explained the reasons. The 'norm' would be to use strong colour in backlights and maybe side light but to keep some open white (OW) from the front to light faces. Whether you prefer the original or the modified version is down to personal taste - there is an argument for leaving alone as that is what was there and the lighting was not controlled by the photographer - or anyone else it seems! :)
 
That’s a very good balance. Better than my quick edit. Would you mind giving a quick summary of the adjustments you made OlyPaul?

The clients were happy with what I supplied as I made them aware of the problems at the time. They weren’t happy with the venue organisation and lighting was just one of their gripes. It worked in my favour as nobody managed to take any casual snaps of the acts since it really was pushing the limits. My shots made it into the local paper and their website so they must have been reasonable.

I’d love to know what you did to get back to those colours though.

Cheers,
Andy.
 
Hi Andy,
Although I have LR2.6 and it is a good all round program my weapon of choice for raw conversion is nearly always Silkypix Studio Developer Pro, and in this case LR was not man enought for the job (not in my hands) mainly because sadly it lacks seperate RGB channels in curves. I did try it in LR but could not get it to my satisfaction, pehaps someone else can do it better.

You could try getting it as good as possible then moving it to PS for curves adjustments. Of course the advantage of being able to do it like this in SPix is that you could just batch process just the raws from the shoot and get consistant results . As long as the client was happy then all is well. :)

in case you are interested heres a grab of the raw converter, you could try emulating the curves adjustments in Photoshop.

Paul
124867522.jpg
 
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