color cast

"chuckmg" wrote in message

Received a photo of an individual for a publication. In "Windows Picture and Fax Viewer" and in "Microsoft Photo Editor" the skin tones look good. In Photoshop CS2, however, the skin has a major orange cast … not so the rest of the photo. Easy to correct using the Photo Filter, but why should it be there in the first place?

One common culprit for weird color casts is the auto color balance setting of your camera. The software is capable of deciding that a particular object that is light blue, for example, and should be gray. So it decides that the lighting conditions are cloudy, and adds yellow to the entire image. We can also force our cameras to do the wrong thing by selecting the wrong white balance setting manually. Or the subject may have been lit by mixed lighting, with one object reflecting on another one to give a mixture of light colors on different parts of the same image.

Fairly often, the camera can decide to do one thing to the shadows, and another the highlights, presenting a substantial puzzle when you attempt to remove the color cast later in Photoshop. This sort of problem can be avoided by shooting in raw mode, and is a major advantage of using that mode, if you camera supports it.

In the end, the source of the cast amounts to a curiosity item. What matters after the fact is fixing the color cast, wherever it may have originated.
—
Mike Russell – www.curvemeister.com

"chuckmg" wrote in message

Received a photo of an individual for a publication. In "Windows Picture and Fax Viewer" and in "Microsoft Photo Editor" the skin tones look good. In Photoshop CS2, however, the skin has a major orange cast … not so the rest of the photo. Easy to correct using the Photo Filter, but why should it be there in the first place?

Chuck

Hi.

The fact that the colour seems Ok in the first 2 programs and wrong in PS suggests that your settings in PS > Edit > Colour Settings are wrong, and PS could be applying some Colour Management depending on what Profiles might be tagged onto the images.

The first 2 Programs have no Colour Management capabilities.

Roy G

"Roy G" wrote in message

"chuckmg" wrote in message

Received a photo of an individual for a publication. In "Windows Picture and Fax Viewer" and in "Microsoft Photo Editor" the skin tones look good. In Photoshop CS2, however, the skin has a major orange cast … not so the rest of the photo. Easy to correct using the Photo Filter, but why should it be there in the first place?

Chuck

Hi.

The fact that the colour seems Ok in the first 2 programs and wrong in PS suggests that your settings in PS > Edit > Colour Settings are wrong, and PS could be applying some Colour Management depending on what Profiles might be tagged onto the images.

The first 2 Programs have no Colour Management capabilities.
Roy G

Roy,

Thought you were really onto the reason. I hadn’t really appreciated the fact that the other 2 programs had no Color Management. As you pointed out, there must be something wrong with my color settings. I reviewed them and found default settings that I do not ordinarily use … e.g. SGB instead of Adobe(1988).
I changed every thing back to what I usually use and imported the jpeg image again with much anticipation. Unfortunately, the cast did not change. The skin was still the same ugly orange. I thought you had the answer. Any more ideas?

Chuck

I changed every thing back to what I usually use and imported the jpeg image again with much anticipation. Unfortunately, the cast did not change. The skin was still the same ugly orange. I thought you had the answer. Any more ideas?

Do you have soft proofing turned on and set to something weird? If not, how does the image look if you set the soft proofing to Monitor RGB?

—
Derek Fountain on the web at http://www.derekfountain.org/

Derek Fountain wrote:

I changed every thing back to what I usually use and imported the jpeg image again with much anticipation. Unfortunately, the cast did not change. The skin was still the same ugly orange. I thought you had the answer. Any more ideas?

Do you have soft proofing turned on and set to something weird? If not, how does the image look if you set the soft proofing to Monitor RGB?

Save for web so its not influenced by a calibrated application.

"chuckmg" wrote in message

[original post]

Received a photo of an individual for a publication. In "Windows Picture and Fax Viewer" and in "Microsoft Photo Editor" the skin tones look good. In Photoshop CS2, however, the skin has a major orange cast … not so the rest of the photo. Easy to correct using the Photo Filter, but why should it be there in the first place?

….
[after Roy G’s suggestion that this is a color management issue]

Thought you were really onto the reason. I hadn’t really appreciated the fact that the other 2 programs had no Color Management. As you pointed out, there must be something wrong with my color settings. I reviewed them and found default settings that I do not ordinarily use … e.g. SGB instead of Adobe(1988).
I changed every thing back to what I usually use and imported the jpeg image again with much anticipation. Unfortunately, the cast did not change. The skin was still the same ugly orange. I thought you had the answer. Any more ideas?

I think Roy had the right answer. It is likely that the image has an unusual profile embedded in it. Skin tones are more prone to look unusual when the overall saturation of the image is increased.

You can get a look at the profile by loading the image into Photoshop, and clicking on the "Assign Profile" button. The original profile name will show initially – ProPhoto RGB is a common profile that greatly increases saturation. Change the assigned profile to sRGB and my guess is that the skin tones will look better.

Derek’s suggestion that you try setting Monitor RGB in the soft proof will also improve the appearance of the colors, since that setting effectively turns off color management within Photoshop for that image. —
Mike Russell – www.curvemeister.com