photos taken without flash, looking yellow

[LaMancha]

hi,
what can you do for the photos shot without a flash, in an inadequately lighted situation. So these photos are quite dark, and there is a strange yellowness of the picture. As far as I have seen, the blue channel is very dark, so the blue information is not captured very well, I try leveling the blue channel and that sometimes helps a little. And sometimes, there seems to be enough detail and contrast but the yellowness ruins the image. And most of the dark images, I think when you change window/level, you end up with too much noise..

So did anybody come accross with any ideas as to what works best? I can guess that the image will never be like a well lighted one no matter how much you work on it, but I would like to hear any improvements..
thanks

 

[JoJoH]

Hi TreePhoto,

Try image->adjust->brightness/contrast first, adjust it to the desire level. Then try image->adjust->hue/satuation, select yellow and take out all the yellow. I don't know how severe you picture is, could you like post a link to it? I adjust an average of over a few hundred pics per month, so if you let me see it, I might be able to help, I "might" that is because I don't know how severe your pic is.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
JoJoH

 

[LaMancha]

thank you very much for your help offer, I am trying to find out a way to put my images to the thread.

 

[JoJoH]

Hi TreePhoto,

Do you have a web host? Upload it to you web host then give me the link to your image.

e.g.

http://www.yoursite.com/images/yourpic.jpg

JoJoH

 

[SPYDERIX]

Hi,

You will also want to play with levels and curves, but from the way you have described your situation it sounds like there might not be much you can do with it and a re-shoot may be nessessary if possible. There is only so much you can do to an image to fix it up and have it still look realistic. I fyou play with it too much you can tell that it has been altered and will look fake and not authentic.

If we could see some examples that would help.

You can either post links to your images but typing in the URL or use

to post the images right into this forum. Both ways require you to have them hosted elsewhere though.

Hope this helps!

General Exception Error:

"Unknown has caused an unknown error in unknown, unknown will now unknown."

 

[LaMancha]

hello,

i hope this way i will be able to make a link to the photos.
i have a lot of these over many years, and i can guess that not one way will fit all photos, i will try all kind of different methods that i will learn from you.. i appreciate all your help and ideas.

it is kind of curious to me though that you guys did not seem to be familiar with yellow-dark images when you do not use flash.. anyway here they are i hope this works this time:

 

[LaMancha]

sorry, i guess it did not work, i do not have a place on the web unfortunately, so i am trying yahoo photos.
click :

http://photos.yahoo.com/bc/tree_pho...003/vwp?.dir=/My+Photos&.dnm=dark.jpg&.src=ph

http://photos.yahoo.com/bc/tree_pho...03/vwp?.dir=/My+Photos&.dnm=dark2.jpg&.src=ph

 

[dimoj]

Hello

Open your image in Photoshop. Press Ctrl+Shift+L on your keyboard. 90% better. Just bump up the brightness and contrast a little. Pretty good result

 

[JoJoH]

Hi TreePhoto this is JoJoH,

Ha! Got rid of the yellow! Do you mind giving me your email than I could email it to you?

Cheers,
JoJoH

 

[JoJoH]

Hey TreePhoto, Ha I think it actually look ALOT better and natural too(to me at least cuz I don't know what is the actual color of the chair or the carpet... I just try to adjust it to the best I think it should be... you should be able to see quite a big difference Can't wait till I could show you!

Cheers,
JoJoH

 

[LaMancha]

hi,

thanks for all the response.. you can email the photos to:

tree_photo2003@yahoo.com

great help, thanks

 

[blueark]

Photographers traditionally put a blue filter in front of the lens when taking indoor photos with artifical light. It cancels out the yellow cast from standard light bulbs, but darkens the image a bit. Still, it shows a little bit about how light works.

To get natural looking images, in terms of color, you should either lighten the blue channel, darken the red & green channels, or a combination of both. Both the levels and curves dialog boxes allow you to work with individual channels, so try these first. They will also allow you to set overall brightness and contrast with much more control than the brightness & contrast tool. In fact, it's best to pretend that tool doesn't exist if you're looking for professional results!

For example, using levels on the first image, you might start with the RGB composite channel, dragging the white arrow under the histogram until it reaches some image data. Then drag the gray arrow right a little, so the image data is distributed more evenly across the full tonal range. If you just increased the brightness, you would end up loosing essential data at the darker end of the spectrum.

To fix the color cast, change from RGB to Blue, and again, play around with the white and gray arrows to take the image data from the darker end of the spectrum, and spread it out a bit more. To finish it off, you might want to adjust the red & green channels, but dragging the black arrow to the left instead. The red channel may require more adjustment than the green, but you can judge this for yourself. Keep changing between the channels as you go until you get the right balance, then click ok.

Of course, you may need to do some more adjustments using other tools, but that's a matter of preference. For example, you might convert it to CMYK to add some contrast to the black channel, and tone down some of the more unrealistic shades, etc, etc.

 

[BHaines]

I sent mods of those photos to that email TreePhoto. The chair one was a lot easier to adjust. I just played with the brightness and contrast, upping both a bot, then went into Image -> Adjust -> Variations, and added a click of blue to cancel out some of the yellow. I didn't want to cancel all the yellow, because the carpet and rug appear to be beige, which require some yellow.

The baby photo was much more difficult because of the darkness. I played mostly with the red and green levels, sliding the right slider bar over. That one won't every be terribly distinct or natural looking without a reshoot I fear. Hope this helped some.

 

[LaMancha]

ok, sorry for the delay:

jojoH and BHaines thanks for the help and corrected images. very impressive results, I will try your methods on my other images.

dimoJ: Ctrl-Shift -L really does most of the job with least work, unbelievable..I never tried it somehow..

blueArk: thanks for the info about the photography side of it. Really interesting and useful info..
And the corrections that you said, I agree and also used exactly that way myself. Also I separated regions on top of color channels, that made the 2nd level of separation which gives you much concentrated and well defined histograms however that has the danger of changing the relative colors of the objects.. maybe large regions are OK..

anyway, thanks everyone who responded and will do so.

 

[JoJoH]

Hey TreePhoto,

Sorry for the delay, I was extremely busy today…here are both of your pics, hope they’re okay! The pic with the chair is a lot easier to optimize than the one with the baby. The baby pic took me a little while, I did a lot of touch-upping on it but it is not perfect though… I think if you want it to be better than that than I would advice you to either re-take the picture at an appropriate lighting or get a better camera with more pixels. What I basically did was what I've told you before, just go to image->adjust->brightness/contrast, adjust it to the desired level. Then go to image->adjust->hue/saturation, select yellow and take out the appropriate amount of yellow, then depending on the picture’s need, continue to choose the appropriate tool and do more adjusting and touch-upping.

Hope this helps!

JoJoH

 

[blueark]

I've just been fixing another photo this morning with similar problems to the baby photo. One thing that worked well was converting the image to Lab color mode, then playing around with levels on each of those channels. It's a little tricky, because the channels in this mode are unlike any other.

The Lightness channel is straightforward enough, and along with levels or curves, it's quite easy to sort out the darkness of the image without affecting the colors. The other two channels take a bit of getting used to because each one can hold a range of color, but subtle adjustments can fix most of the color cast. You will probably need to increase the saturation of the image afterwards though, as it will be a little bit lacking in color.

As an aside, Lab color probably has the widest range of colors out of all the standard modes, and internally Photoshop uses it extensively as an intermediate mode when converting between other modes.

 

[LaMancha]

Hi,

Here are the corrections that JoJoH and BHaines did on my photos. I hope these will help other users as well:

JoJoH did:
"image->adjust->brightness/contrast, adjust it to the desired level. Then go to image->adjust->hue/saturation, select yellow and take out the appropriate amount of yellow, then depending on the picture’s need, continue to choose the appropriate tool and do more adjusting and touch-upping"



BHaines did:
"I upped the brightness and contrast a little, then went into
Image->Adjust->Variations and hit "More Blue" once. The baby was harder, but I played with the
levels, moving the right side slider towards the middle on the red and green areas"

photos are here:

dark original, BHaines corrected, JoJoH corrected in order:

[

http://photos.yahoo.com/bc/tree_pho...hoto2003/lst?&.dir=/My+Photos&.src=ph&.view=t

]

[

http://photos.yahoo.com/bc/tree_pho...hoto2003/lst?&.dir=/My+Photos&.src=ph&.view=t

]

[

http://photos.yahoo.com/bc/tree_pho...hoto2003/lst?&.dir=/My+Photos&.src=ph&.view=t

]

Dark2 original, BH, JJ corrected:

[

http://photos.yahoo.com/bc/tree_pho...hoto2003/lst?&.dir=/My+Photos&.src=ph&.view=t

]

[

http://photos.yahoo.com/bc/tree_pho...hoto2003/lst?&.dir=/My+Photos&.src=ph&.view=t

]

[

http://photos.yahoo.com/bc/tree_pho...hoto2003/lst?&.dir=/My+Photos&.src=ph&.view=t

]

 

[horqua]

I'd recommend changing the color balance option in your digital camera the next time you're shooting under similar circumstances. Your images are yellow becaues you're using the Daylight camera setting under Tungsten conditions. The yellow cast is coming from the tungsten (incandescent) light bulbs. Since you're not using flash, which is balanced to daylight (blue), your images fall on the yellow/red side. Another method you can use, if it's available in your camera, is to set the White Balance of your camera under tungsten conditions. These instructions can be found in your camera manual. Remember to change the White Balance back to Daylight when you go outside, otherwise you'll get a whole new set of color casts/problems.


Knock and the door shall be opened unto you. Seek and ye shall find!