White Balance Tweaking of Photos

PF
Posted By
Paul Furman
Mar 5, 2006
Views
335
Replies
3
Status
Closed
I wanted to warm up one photo to move it 20 minutes ahead into the glowing afternoon sun… another was too minty green and when I tried adjusting the colors (one through the raw converter, the other just a jpeg with adjustment layers) they both came out flat or contrast effected like fiddling with individual channels for b&w and the WB adjustment drained some of the richness in them. I tried setting layers to luminosity instead of ‘color balance’ and they all sucked. Is lab mode what I need for this? I want to adjust the colors (warmer & richer) but the luminance is getting messed up. Does White Balance effect image quality significantly? It seems to.
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J
jaSPAMc
Mar 5, 2006
On Sun, 05 Mar 2006 05:56:54 GMT, Paul Furman found
these unused words floating about:

I wanted to warm up one photo to move it 20 minutes ahead into the glowing afternoon sun… another was too minty green and when I tried adjusting the colors (one through the raw converter, the other just a jpeg with adjustment layers) they both came out flat or contrast effected like fiddling with individual channels for b&w and the WB adjustment drained some of the richness in them. I tried setting layers to luminosity instead of ‘color balance’ and they all sucked. Is lab mode what I need for this? I want to adjust the colors (warmer & richer) but the luminance is getting messed up. Does White Balance effect image quality significantly? It seems to.

IMHO "white balance" is useful for correcting off tone whites. You could correct using levels and the eye droppers and -=then=- trim the color balance to what you wnat for ‘tone’.
PF
Paul Furman
Mar 5, 2006

J. A. Mc. wrote:
On Sun, 05 Mar 2006 05:56:54 GMT, Paul Furman found
these unused words floating about:

I wanted to warm up one photo to move it 20 minutes ahead into the glowing afternoon sun… another was too minty green and when I tried adjusting the colors (one through the raw converter, the other just a jpeg with adjustment layers) they both came out flat or contrast effected like fiddling with individual channels for b&w and the WB adjustment drained some of the richness in them. I tried setting layers to luminosity instead of ‘color balance’ and they all sucked. Is lab mode what I need for this? I want to adjust the colors (warmer & richer) but the luminance is getting messed up. Does White Balance effect image quality significantly? It seems to.

IMHO "white balance" is useful for correcting off tone whites. You could correct using levels and the eye droppers and -=then=- trim the color balance to what you wnat for ‘tone’.

I wanted to give a warmer orange color cast to a minty green scene, toning down the greens & moving toward yellow, red, magenta… the luminance (brightness/b&w value) looked best in the greens though and this washed out the contrast so I made a curves adj. layer to boost the greens back up & applied that as luminance mode. I’m guessing lab mode might have been a simpler way to do this and perhaps less desctructive since the end result still seemed lackluster. Maybe ‘lackluster’ is unavoidable if you try to squeeze out too many colors that weren’t in the original image. It’s mostly a green image & a lot of it went gray so then I tried a copy of the green boost adj. layer as saturation mode to bring back color to those grayed out regions.

Another thing is that dropping the greens in raw conversion doesn’t leave much info for the green luminance so I’d have to convert raw twice, once for the colors, once for the tones. With raw, maybe there is no reason to use lab mode but lab might help when starting from a jpeg.

One more way to warm up the colors might be some kind of color replacement filter? Instead of removing valuable green data, change some of the greens to warm orange tones.

It could just be impractical to get a nice orange tinted image from a mint green original because they are complimentary (opposing) colors.
MR
Mike Russell
Mar 5, 2006
"Paul Furman" wrote in message
I wanted to warm up one photo to move it 20 minutes ahead into the glowing afternoon sun… another was too minty green and when I tried adjusting the colors (one through the raw converter, the other just a jpeg with adjustment layers) they both came out flat or contrast effected like fiddling with individual channels for b&w and the WB adjustment drained some of the richness in them. I tried setting layers to luminosity instead of ‘color balance’ and they all sucked. Is lab mode what I need for this? I want to adjust the colors (warmer & richer) but the luminance is getting messed up. Does White Balance effect image quality significantly? It seems to.

Do try Lab mode, and move the magenta (positive) end of the a curve horizontally toward the middle of the image. Do the same with the b curve, moving the yellow (positive) end in the same direction to get more of a red or orange glow.

If your image lacks contrast in general, make the Lightness curve steeper, probably by moving the black end in to deepen the shadows. There is more you can do, but this will be a start.

This sort of thing is harder to do in RGB mode, but can be done. The trick, once again, is to add contrast by deepening your shadows, as well as warming it up with additional red.

BTW – the curvemeister class starts today. This is a free one month online class that deals with this sort of issue, and you are encouraged to bring your own images to share for class discussion. Send me an email mike at Curvemeister dot com if you’d like to participate.
—
Mike Russell
www.curvemeister.com

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