Blues Clues

Yesterday I talked about shooting at a service at church Sunday night. With the new lighting came some new challenges. The image above was shot with an EF 70-200 f/2.8L IS USM lens on a 5D Mk II. The subject is Amanda, the wife of the Gathering's pastor. The new lighting includes eight stage cans with some of them gelled with blue or red. The red gelled lights add to the which floods while the blue gelled cans feather the light at the outside edge of the stage. It also casts an overwhelming blue light n anyone who is in its wake. Amanda is an example of that effect.

This next image is of Amanda being hit full force with the blue flood and is not pleasing at all. (Sorry Amanda, It's not you at all)

So what do we do if we want to make an image like this workable. There has to be something that works. There are a number of tools in Photoshop that can be used to adjust, remove, or change the color cast of an image. What I am looking to do though is work just in Lightroom to conquer some of these challenges. It looks like it was taken in daylight with tungsten whit balance and that is something we could use but that would effect the entire image and I don't want to do that. I just want to have Amanda look human and not like a Smurf.

One thing we can do with the local adjustment brush in Lightroom 2 is add color locally. Now we have to decide what color to use. Enter the color wheel:

Using color mixing is nothing new. Plato in 300+ B.C. discovered mixing two colors would generate a third, not that colors had not been used before but the mixing was new. This is all fine for color that is being put to paper, or stone as the case may be. Printers generally run in a CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black) color space where as displays run in an RGB (Red, Green, and Blue) space. With paint, if you mix all the colors you end up with a brownish black pigment, on a display you get white (go figure!). So mixing is a two edged sword too much is bad and not enough is, well... Not enough!

To deal with the blue cast in the image of Amanda, there is really a good amount purple (a secondary color) in the hue. Follow across the color wheel brings us to a yellowish color. So what will this do when we add it to the already blue color. It doesn't completely cancel it out but that's not what we want it to do anyhow. It does tame it down to where we can make it more believable for the environment. Take a look at the end result below.

The scene retains the blue hue of the stage lighting but Amanda's skin tones are brought back. This actually took two applications in Lightroom but it does demonstrate the power in that fine application. If you look at the original image of Amanda in the background, the same treatment was done to her face and arms. I left her hair alone in that image as the light was hitting it a little different.

That will wrap up todays post. Sorry if it got a little techie but if you got this far, you must have been a little interested.

Cya... Doug