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Beginner Yellow hue over the sea and into the sun
- Thread starter JennyCK
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- Name
- Mark
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Looking at the picture I would guess its caused by lens flare.
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/lens-flare.htm
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/lens-flare.htm
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- Paul
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I'd agree with Jon that the white balance is off: the clouds should at that time of day really still be more or less white/grey so you can pull your white balance from that (either change "by eye" until they no longer look yellow or, better, if using Lightroom use the eyedropper tool next to the white balance sliders).
I also think the saturation has been ramped up a fair bit, which will exaggerate the colours - might be worth dialling that back down again a bit?
Shooting into the sun is difficult especially for DLSRs as our cameras don't have a great dynamic range... so it's all too easy to get blown highlights as you have in your picture (the sun and the reflection from the sea are basically just 100% white rather than shades of colour). Unfortunately with the sun in that position in the sky, there's not much you can do to capture an image that isn't going to be blown so you might find a more pleasing image by leaving the sun out of the frame... hope that helps.
I also think the saturation has been ramped up a fair bit, which will exaggerate the colours - might be worth dialling that back down again a bit?
Shooting into the sun is difficult especially for DLSRs as our cameras don't have a great dynamic range... so it's all too easy to get blown highlights as you have in your picture (the sun and the reflection from the sea are basically just 100% white rather than shades of colour). Unfortunately with the sun in that position in the sky, there's not much you can do to capture an image that isn't going to be blown so you might find a more pleasing image by leaving the sun out of the frame... hope that helps.
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- Stewart
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OK, that's interesting.
For starters, I don't think it's lens flare. The chromatic artefacts around the sun probably are caused by the lens, but I think the yellow hue near the horizon isn't. It's too "natural", in the sense that the colours in that part of the photo seem to be associated with the objects in the image. There's a yellow layer on the horizon, with a layer of white clouds avove it; if the colour were a lens artefact, I woudn't expect it to behave like that.
I think the white balance is part of the issue, but I'm honestly not sure how much. @pjm1 has a point that clouds at this time of day ought to be more white/grey, but I think the puffy clouds around the sun *are* white/grey. The heavy layer of clouds just above the horizon does have a bit of a colour cast, but removing that and making those clouds white/grey doesn't make the yellow colour go away. Altering the white balance so drastically that the yellow goes away leaves the clouds above the yellow layer looking rather unnatural. So whilst the white balance is a bit suspect, I don't think it's the whole story.
I think the saturation is far too high, and that's causing a lot of the problems. To my mind, the green and red tones on the hillside in the foreground are too intense, which suggests that the saturation is artificially high. That would be causing some of the yellowness too.
Two other factors which I think could be at work here are more-or-less natural. One is that there genuinely may be a bit of yellowness out there. In certain weather conditions pollution can get trapped at the bottom of the atmosphere and that causes a sort of yellow/orange murk. If that's happening, even a bit, it might create a bit of yellow down there that the white balance and saturation shifts have amplified.
And finally the other thing that I think could be happening is an artefact of the way our eyes work. There's so much strong blue in the image, I think there's a tendency for the eye to exaggerate not-blue things so that they can be seen better. For example, I found that if I altered the white balance so that the cloud layer above the horizon was white/grey, it didn't look white/grey against the blue sky. Zoom in so that it fills the screen, and it *is* white/grey, but zoom out to see the sky and the clouds seem to take on a contrasting hue. That's probably why I couldn't get them looking right.
So in summary I think what we're seeing here is a combination of several things:
- pollution in the atmosphere creating a bit of yellow murk;
- white balance not quite right;
- saturation too high;
- our eyes trying to see tones that contract with the strong blue colour.
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I've seen a similar effect with my own eyes from the deck of the Harwick-Hoek ferry a year or two ago, a band of tobacco yellow cloud and haze that circled 360-degrees of the horizon. I've a photo of it somewhere. A low lying layer of atmospheric dust, pollen and pollution. Knowing the date the photo was taken would help relate it back to known weather/pollution conditions at that time.
