White Balance and when to remove color casts

[Ron E Racine]

I do a lot of photography in Thailand, typically in the late afternoon 4PM to 5:30PM. The part of the country I am in tends to have a lot of haze so long before the sun sets it takes on a orange/red glow which tends to cause things to have very warm light.

I always shoot RAW and set the WB in lightroom. Now if I choose the As-Shot or Daylight settings the birds and scene tend to look as they did when I saw them which is warmer than during mid-day but with a slightly warm color cast.

I can remove the color cast using the eye-dropper for WB or manually adjusting, but then the scene does not look the same as I actually saw it.

So my question is when should I remove the warmth of the scene and when should I leave it in? For landscape photography it seems simpler and I would typically leave it warm especially if at or near sunset. However with bird photography it seems that it is normal to remove these colors casts and render the birds as if there were shot during mid-day? This is based on feedback I have seen in the BPN forums.

What do others do in these situations, any comments or feedback on how you handle this would be greatly appreciated as I am still very much learning when it comes to post processing and image optimization.


Ron

[Daniel Cadieux]

If there is a warm cast due to early morning or late afternoon "sweet" light then I leave it in, but I am also careful not to oversaturate that "cast". I do tend to remove bluish casts on subjects that were taken in the shade - it especially happens when the subject is in a shady spot on otherwise sunny conditions.

Sometimes the raw file will have a cast that was not there at time of capture and these will be removed. Winter scenes in low-light overcast days will often have a blue cast. I could use the "cloudy" WB but I do not often like the "too yellow" result it gives.

Personal taste can come into play, and of course a calibrated monitor is a must...

[Diane Miller]

Daniel summed up my opinion. I will often reduce an early or late light warm cast (but not remove it entirely) simply because if I don't it may look overdone to the viewer. There is a subtle difference between warm light and a color cast that is difficult to explain, but with practice you learn to see it and then make your own decisions. A color cast can be any color, but is commonly brought out by warm light. And a Raw converter can only make a guess -- it isn't true to the scene.

[Duane Noblick]

I have to agree with Daniel and Diane and I also have trouble seeing color casts but I'm learing to see them by adjusting the WB sliders along with the hue/saturation adjustments. Reading replies to other images that have a true color cast is also helpful in seeing it for yourself. I ran into this issue last week after photographing a bald eagle at first light. The eagle feathers/branch in was perched on were red, the head feathers were yellow and the sky had a purple tint to it...not accurate to what colors I saw with my own eyes that morning. I was shooting in auto WB and I'm not sure how the camera decided the WB but it was incorrect...I switched to "sunny" WB in camera and after yesterday the colors seem more accurate to what I was seeing even though there was a warm cast to the eagle.

[David Stephens]

I've noticed a tendency here to leave warm cast but remove cool cast. I don't understand that thinking. Here in Colorado, scenic shots of water, sky and snow have a blue cast, when seen by the eye. (I was confirming this myself, as I shot a mountain-scape, and checked to confirm that the snow was really bluish. Why is that?

[Diane Miller]

Because it's reflecting the sky color? When I partially correct a warm cast in highlights, it leaves cool shadows, which I like -- complementary colors. WB doesn't give you an option to treat shadows and highlights separately.

Sometimes on the internet I'll see a landscape in which there is dramatic warm light from a sunset / sunrise and then there are shadow areas. It looks really odd in the cases where the shadows are neutralized to gray tones. (Of course, what neutralized them might have been an exaggeration of the warm tones by introducing an overall color cast.) But I can see changing the balance in birds or other animals to preserve the descriptive value of the natural colors.

[Ron E Racine]

Thanks everyone for the great discussion and comments.

On my images that I see are overly warm I plan to reduce the warmth without necessarily going to pure neutral, to preserve a little of the warmth I originally saw. I now also know that I need to be careful of the saturation of red/oranges when shooting in this light as they tend to be overly saturated due to the inherent color of the light.

Ron

[David Stephens]

Because it's reflecting the sky color? When I partially correct a warm cast in highlights, it leaves cool shadows, which I like -- complementary colors. WB doesn't give you an option to treat shadows and highlights separately.

Sometimes on the internet I'll see a landscape in which there is dramatic warm light from a sunset / sunrise and then there are shadow areas. It looks really odd in the cases where the shadows are neutralized to gray tones. (Of course, what neutralized them might have been an exaggeration of the warm tones by introducing an overall color cast.) But I can see changing the balance in birds or other animals to preserve the descriptive value of the natural colors.

Yes, reflecting both sky and water.

Here's one, with close snow in shadow, distant snow in sun, blue sky and blue water. The overall feeling is BLUE. I use the distant snow caps in the sun as my gauge of color accuracy. I think that the accuracy of the near snow at my feet is very good, but since it's not white, I'm going on memory there. The overall pastels is what really drew me to this image:

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7303/13017801963_d1f38081c6_b.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/dcstep/13017801963/)
Snowy Morn (http://www.flickr.com/photos/dcstep/13017801963/) by dcstep (http://www.flickr.com/people/dcstep/), on Flickr

[Diane Miller]

Wonderful rich blues! The flexibility we have with color can be frustrating but is so rewarding when we get it right.

Lightroom users can open an image in PS with the BG layer as a Smart Object and can go back and tweak the actual raw settings at any time (unlike the "new" thing in PS CC which only lets you use the ACR sliders on an already rasterized file). Photo > Edit in > Open as Smart Object in PS. Of course you'll need to get this right before you do any pixel layers such as Nik or Topaz filters or any cloning. But masked adjustment layers are OK to use.

[DickLudwig]

Wonderful rich blues! The flexibility we have with color can be frustrating but is so rewarding when we get it right.

Lightroom users can open an image in PS with the BG layer as a Smart Object and can go back and tweak the actual raw settings at any time (unlike the "new" thing in PS CC which only lets you use the ACR sliders on an already rasterized file). Photo > Edit in > Open as Smart Object in PS. Of course you'll need to get this right before you do any pixel layers such as Nik or Topaz filters or any cloning. But masked adjustment layers are OK to use.
In Lightroom you can use the brush tool on a RAW file to make local changes in color temperatures. This will allow you to cool down areas of snow that are too warm in a sunset image so in effect you can set two different WB's.

[David Stephens]

In Lightroom you can use the brush tool on a RAW file to make local changes in color temperatures. This will allow you to cool down areas of snow that are too warm in a sunset image so in effect you can set two different WB's.


Dick, that's good to know. Thanks to you and Diane.

[Diane Miller]

Good point, Dick. I was stuck with thinking of smaller areas such as the edge of a bird that's in the shade. But for larger and mostly contiguous areas, the adjustment brush would work well.

[Daniel Cadieux]

I agree snow often naturally has a blue cast to it, and that should be left in, but that is different than an obvious colour cast that should be tamed. David, your posted example is a superb one!

[David Stephens]

I agree snow often naturally has a blue cast to it, and that should be left in, but that is different than an obvious colour cast that should be tamed. David, your posted example is a superb one!

Thanks Daniel.