Software "filter" to remove tungsten lighting effects?

Hi!

The photographer was not allowed to use flash during the vows of a
wedding in a chapel with tungsten lighting, so the photos have a
red-orange overcast. I was able to use PS 6.0 to "hack" the tungsten
lighting effect into a bareable level.

I'm only an occasional PS user, and used hit-or-miss to achieve barely
acceptable results. Are there better programs to remove the tungsten
lighting overcast? Are there digital filters or settings or plug-ins
for PS to do this with professional and accurate results?

Thank you,
Wendie

On 9/8/07 12:00 PM, in article ,
"Wendie Luter" wrote:

Hi!

The photographer was not allowed to use flash during the vows of a
wedding in a chapel with tungsten lighting, so the photos have a
red-orange overcast. I was able to use PS 6.0 to "hack" the tungsten
lighting effect into a bareable level.

I'm only an occasional PS user, and used hit-or-miss to achieve barely
acceptable results. Are there better programs to remove the tungsten
lighting overcast? Are there digital filters or settings or plug-ins
for PS to do this with professional and accurate results?

Thank you,
Wendie
Lightroom comes to mind.

Wendie Luter wrote:
The photographer was not allowed to use flash during the vows of a
wedding in a chapel with tungsten lighting, so the photos have a
red-orange overcast. I was able to use PS 6.0 to "hack" the tungsten
lighting effect into a bareable level.

It's an easy matter to fix.

I'm only an occasional PS user, and used hit-or-miss to achieve barely
acceptable results. Are there better programs to remove the tungsten
lighting overcast? Are there digital filters or settings or plug-ins
for PS to do this with professional and accurate results?

You don't need any other tools.

First, most decent digitial cameras allow you to set the white balance.
Second, if you're shooting RAW then the RAW converter allows you to set
the white balance. You can just select tungsten from the pull-down menu.
Third, you can use the ImageAdjustmentsCurves tool. Click on one of
the three eyedroppers and you can then click on a point in the picture
that should be white (or gray) and Photoshop will make the needed
adjustment.
Fourth, you can use the Color Balance tool (which, IMO, is a pain).

--
Ray Fischer

I've used this with good results:
http://www.thepluginsite.com/product...sher/index.htm

Also used AGD Color Temperature & Exposure Correction but looks like
it is no longer available.

You're not alone ...
http://photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00Acoa

"Wendie Luter" wrote in message
...
The photographer was not allowed to use flash during the vows of a
wedding in a chapel with tungsten lighting, so the photos have a
red-orange overcast. I was able to use PS 6.0 to "hack" the tungsten
lighting effect into a bareable level.

I'm only an occasional PS user, and used hit-or-miss to achieve barely
acceptable results. Are there better programs to remove the tungsten
lighting overcast? Are there digital filters or settings or plug-ins
for PS to do this with professional and accurate results?

The ideal solution would be to go back to the same location and situation
and take a picture of an 18% grey card, or even a white piece of paper under
the same light and use that to see the colour of the light landing in that
area. You can then balance the colour cast back to neutral and apply the
same correction to your photos. This is especially helpful if you have the
raw images but can be used to correct the jpgs too.

If you have the RAW files from the camera, then just change the colour
temperature and tint back to where you like it or click the white balance
dropper on something white or neutral grey and reconvert the image. This
will give the best result because it is the same as if you had set the white
balance correctly in your camera before you started taking pictures. There
is no loss of image quality.

If you are stuck with jpg pictures (why would you not have the RAWs?) then
you can use the photoshop "levels" (image-adjustments-levels) command and
click the grey point dropper on something white in the image that is not in
a shadow such as the bride's dress, the groom's shirt, a tablecloth,
whatever should be white and not the yellow that you see. This will correct
that image. Just make sure that you don't click on something that is white
and saturated (blown) or the correction will be wrong.

If you don't have any white or neutral grey reference in the image, an
automatic solution in photoshop is to use the "match color" command
(image-adjustments-match color) and click the neutralize button. This
will often do a good job of eliminating any colour casts quickly and
painlessly.

Finally you can use the colour balance control as a last resort to try to
affect the colour balance. Adjust the red-blue balance to try to match the
light, and the green-magenta balance to affect the tint and get the skin
tones nice.

If your photoshop is too old to have these commands (these are in CS2 for
sure), then try the camera maker's software. The Canon zoombrowser software
is able to set the colour balance and Canon Digital Photo Professional has a
white balance dropper for jpgs.

I hope that you have a colour calibrated computer monitor to edit these on.
It would be a shame if you spent the time and effort to get the iamges
looking good on your monitor only to find that your monitor has a colour
cast and your new prints come out with the opposite cast as a result.

On Sat, 08 Sep 2007 07:13:26 -1000, Scott W
wrote:

Wendie Luter wrote:
Hi!

The photographer was not allowed to use flash during the vows of a
wedding in a chapel with tungsten lighting, so the photos have a
red-orange overcast. I was able to use PS 6.0 to "hack" the tungsten
lighting effect into a bareable level.

I'm only an occasional PS user, and used hit-or-miss to achieve barely
acceptable results. Are there better programs to remove the tungsten
lighting overcast? Are there digital filters or settings or plug-ins
for PS to do this with professional and accurate results?

Thank you,
Wendie

Rather then try to fix the problem after the fact why not just set the
camera's white balance to tungsten. Better yet shoot raw and set the WB
to whatever you want when converting the raw images.

If you have photos that have already been taken then look at remove
color cast, this does not work as well has shooting with the correct WB
to begin with but it does work OK.

Scott


The photos have been taken, and can't be re-taken. How do I remove
"color cast?" Is this a PhotoShop option?

Thank you,
Wendie

On Sat, 08 Sep 2007 12:16:11 -0500, George Kerby
wrote:




On 9/8/07 12:00 PM, in article ,
"Wendie Luter" wrote:

Hi!

The photographer was not allowed to use flash during the vows of a
wedding in a chapel with tungsten lighting, so the photos have a
red-orange overcast. I was able to use PS 6.0 to "hack" the tungsten
lighting effect into a bareable level.

I'm only an occasional PS user, and used hit-or-miss to achieve barely
acceptable results. Are there better programs to remove the tungsten
lighting overcast? Are there digital filters or settings or plug-ins
for PS to do this with professional and accurate results?

Thank you,
Wendie
Lightroom comes to mind.

At your suggestion, I checked Lightroom out. This looks to be the
solution.

Thank you,
Wendie

On Sat, 08 Sep 2007 13:00:23 -0400, Wendie Luter wrote:

Hi!

The photographer was not allowed to use flash during the vows of a
wedding in a chapel with tungsten lighting, so the photos have a
red-orange overcast. I was able to use PS 6.0 to "hack" the tungsten
lighting effect into a bareable level.

I'm only an occasional PS user, and used hit-or-miss to achieve barely
acceptable results. Are there better programs to remove the tungsten
lighting overcast? Are there digital filters or settings or plug-ins
for PS to do this with professional and accurate results?

Thank you,
Wendie

Try "ColorWasher v2.0x" plugin from http://thepluginsite.com/

It's able to balance out some very difficult lighting situations that are
outside of the control of the photographer or any camera's auto white-balance
features. I've used it to effectively balance UV lamps + incandescent +
fluorescent lamps on my subjects when all those light sources were being used
equally in aggregate to attract and macro-photograph night-flying insects. A
white-balance lighting nightmare situation that no other editor could even come
close to resolving properly.

p.s. Dump that archaic PhotoShop program and any new incarnations of it. Even
CS3 is no better. It's 16-bit-only math along with its outdated bicubic
interpolation for all its manipulation and cloning tools is last century's total
nonsense. Try a better and more advanced editor like PhotoLine 32 from
www.pl32.net It's been a 32-bit program for over a decade now (hence the name
PL32) and even has Lanczos8 interpolation for all its tools, to retain any
details that PhotoShop's bicubic would smear and blur. It also works just fine
with the ColorWasher plugin.

"Scott W" wrote:

It should be, I use Photoshop elements, small brother to Photoshop, and
there it is under the enhance menu, adjust color. You get an eye dropper
that you then click on something that you know should be white in the
photo.

Have you ever gotten a decent result doing that? I certainly haven't. In
real life, nothing's actually white* and any daylight scene has both shadow
and directly lit areas with different color temperatures.

In raw conversion, checking the overall impression by eye and looking at the
readouts for areas that should be gray or white to make sure that things are
reasonable is a pain, but it seems to be required.

*: I just did a test shot with three reference cards: a resolution test
image printed on enhanced matte (very blue from the whiteners), a Kodak 18%
gray card (roughly neutral), and a Kodak gray scale (patches of different
gray levels in 1/3 stop increments) that is strongly warm toned. Not only
did all three have different color temperatures, but the differences were
large.

David J. Littleboy
Tokyo, Japan

Wendie Luter wrote:
Hi!

The photographer was not allowed to use flash during the vows of a
wedding in a chapel with tungsten lighting, so the photos have a
red-orange overcast. I was able to use PS 6.0 to "hack" the tungsten
lighting effect into a bareable level.

I'm only an occasional PS user, and used hit-or-miss to achieve barely
acceptable results. Are there better programs to remove the tungsten
lighting overcast? Are there digital filters or settings or plug-ins
for PS to do this with professional and accurate results?

Thank you,
Wendie

Strangely, it sounds like all your images are in jpeg format.
Otherwise you would be asking how to set the WB in your raw converter.
Your raw processing software could have been set to use use a different
white-balance to result in a neutral image, despite the WB on your camera.

If you shot in jpeg and were using Corel Photoshop, it would be a five
second fix.
"image"-"adjust"-"color balance" move the cyan/red slider to -10% and
the yellow/blue slider to +10% while leaving the magenta/green slider alone.
A slight tweeking of the slider settings would fix up the WB completely,
if that starting poiont WB adjustment wasn't quite correct in first go.
If the same lighting was used throughout the event, then the same
settings will fix the lot.

Adobe Photoshop must have sometehing similar (I don't use it).
Otherwise you just may have been ripped off, if such a basic editing
feature has been left out of such a pricey piece of software.