How to Remove Color Casts

How to Remove Color Casts

Hi, everybody. This is Craig Tanner for the Mindful Eye and the Daily Critique. Today’s image was submitted by Billy. He is an intermediate photographer. Billy created this image on the Mindful Eye’s Zion National Park Workshop. Billy used the Canon mark 31DS. That’s the full frame sensor camera, 16 to 35 zoom at 16mm, stop down to F11 and it’s exposed the file for an 8th of a second.

Now, the first thing I love about this image is quality of line. Billy has something very important here. If you’re shooting traditional big scenic landscapes, he’s got a real strong feeling of leading line that can lead the viewer all the way to the frame and that can really help to create the illusion that this is the space that though was sent or in other words not just moving side to side and up and down but the viewer can actually move from the near subjects out into the middle ground and onto background through the pictures if it had a third dimension.

The other thing in addition to the beautiful quality of leading lines is just the way that Billy has framed this. I love the fact that I can just get around this idea down here. When I come up here I can either sort of move in an S-curve kind of way or seek her way and then come back into the image.

Something else that I really like here is this little shape of blue. So much of the time when I'm teaching students and we’re working on and say architectural interiors or landscapes. I encouraged people to shoot variations but I don’t include the top here. I'm just tempting to go up there because I have the lightest up there in the interiors, there’s a lot of time beautiful lighting fixtures but there’s a lot of contrast up there too and it can overwhelm everything else.

In this case, to me this really works with the image. My color standpoint helps to balance all the yellow and orange. And from the shapes stand point again the quality of line up there is very rhythmic with a lot of these beautiful qualities of line that Billy has included in the composition.

Now the thing that I really enjoy is the way there is still a negative space shape here. It plays off with this negative space shape here, and just that quality of light here, a very dramatic light on the background. It really helps to pull me all the way through the image.

When I think about the perfect role improvement for this image, there are a couple of different things that I think about. One of the things that I think about is cleaning color up. One of the difficult things about shooting in the location like Zion where you get this red canyon walls, you have a lot of reflected light when you’re looking at it. You’re eyes correct for this and you continue to look at different subjects like the grass and the river and the tree, and see colors in more of a pure and consistent way but our cameras can’t do that. They pick up all these reflected light and you get this overlay of yellow red on top of everything that can rub the image you’ve colored up.

So I’d like the work on cleaning that up. This thing is very dramatic back in here at the images and I like to sort of push some areas at the image towards higher contrast where you get a continuation of that feeling so that this doesn’t overwhelm the rest of the image in terms of the way ideas are separating. And then something else I’d like to do that means will have to be open to change in the editorial content of the image. But I like to take this rock and scale it into the corner. I want to do that for three reasons.

Right now, this is a powerful subject in the image. This is one of the main subjects. They’re totally lined up with each other which will come static when I move to the image. If I move to the rock over here, there’ll be more of a dynamic flow of movement between those two subjects.

The other reason I’d like to move the rock over here is when it gets in to this corner, it’s going to do a beautiful job of rhyming the space shape. So you’ll have this cross hatching of rhymes in the corners and the other reason I’d like to move it into these areas, this is a big flat negative space shape that crops mine and really makes this part of the image one of the only areas that is just flattened out in a sort of square it off.

I'm going to create a longer video that includes all the detail work that I'm doing here. And then I'm going to the digital darkroom over the course in the next few days and find that video. For now I'm just going through to keep those 10 minutes or less which is what we’re doing for now on the Daily Critique.

I'm just going to show you my layers. I’ve copied the background layer first. The next thing that I did was the re-scaling work. You know, I'm really being interested to hear from people what they think about this. I know for a lot of people that just the idea of doing this kind of things is counter to what you want to do. I realized that and I'm interested here in that feedback too. Also, I’m really interested in here and what do you think this makes the image work better from a design standpoint. The next two layers, it’s blurring technique that I’ll show you specifically how I do to create a feeling of blur on the water. That’s a little bit more like what Billy we’ve got in a few and then we’re going to the half second or a second.

What I've done is I've blur the specular highlights in here on the water. On one layer in this direction, I came back and blur them again in this direction because this water doesn’t just move in one direction in a long exposure. It hits and it really spreads out and it creates more of a realistic blur like you’ve done in cameras, so there’s part of the work, and there’s the other part of the work.

Next thing that I did was I came in and I did a levels adjustment to pop the water out, and now, I'm going to start working on making colors separate by getting rid of the color cast. I used curves to do that. You can tell that I've cooled the water off, but I've left the rocks on the foreground warm and I've cooled the green off. I've done that because people associate water with cooler temperature on an average blue or green. So it makes sense if I'm going to take something and cool it off to do it to the water. I've left the rocks warm, so it all separate and I’ll try to make more of the pure green.

This is real subtle but I came in and out white balance this big shadow up in here to get rid of all the blue in there. Again, to make this the area of blue and not this blue with this two ideas being right next to each other so this is more subtle. I’ll turn it on and then there’s the work that we’ve done and there’s off, and hard to save it. You can see what you can see what you think about that if you can see it all in the video.

And then next thing that I did was levels adjustment to try and make the whole image pop a little bit more and I’ve biased this towards the rocks, the grass and the cotton woods. So I've made a whole image sync a little bit more but I biased it towards the areas to try and create more this separation of ideas. I still feel like that is too warm so I came out and get a color balance to get rid of some red and yellow. And then the last thing that I did was a blank layer and soft like blending mode using black to add even more dimension.

Remember I talked about wanting to make the image balance more overall with this sort of raw brooding light and dark next to each other. I'm going to come in, and I'm going to paint any areas like this to try and create more of a feeling of that contrast to make it more balance overall and there is that change. And so here is where we started, and here’s where we ended up and like I said please go to the digital darkroom and you can see it in a detail way how I made all these changes.

I want to say a big thank you to Billy for participating in the workshop and for creating a really beautiful shot here. I really love the way Billy’s working on the widening of the lens here and I’ll choose in the scene to use leading line in a very powerful way. I love the framing from left to right. I love the way Billy’s working with the quality of light here. I love the all tops sliver of blue.

I want to say a big thank you to Billy for sharing this image with us on the Mindful Eye’s Daily Critique. See you tomorrow everybody.


Transcription by: Scribe4you Transcription Services