# Help with Nighttime White Balance



## stevevp (Jan 21, 2017)

Hi,
One of my biggest problems with Lightroom is dealing with colour cast.
I took a number of photos recently at Seville's Feast of the Three Kings. Ignoring any composition or other problems with the images (!) all the pics have a yellow and/or mauve colour cast which I am having trouble getting rid of. Using the dropper tool eg on the horse gets rid of some of the mauve cast but shunts everything towards green. Thanks in anticipation for any suggestions on how best to handle this - preferably not by changing to B&W!


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## Johan Elzenga (Jan 21, 2017)

Horses aren't usually neutral grey, so use the eye dropper on something else that should indeed be neutral grey. The white letters on the traffic signpost might be a good spot. You probably won't be able to completely neutralize the color cast, but I think you should not want to do that either. It is a night scene after all, so it should look like one.


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## stevevp (Jan 21, 2017)

Many thanks for your reply. Unfortunately, clicking on the white lettering or eg on the white gloves of the standard bearers also shunts everything towards yellow/green and, even in a night scene, I'm not sure the horses should look quite so yellow ...


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## Johan Elzenga (Jan 21, 2017)

I've looked at your image a little closer and it seems the subjects are lit from several angles with different colored lights. There is a strong blue light coming from the front of the horses. If you go to the HSL tab you can change the hue and the saturation of each color individually. That gives you a lot more options than the White Balance alone, but still you won't be able to neutralise this completely in Lightroom. This would need Photoshop and a lot of masking.


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## clee01l (Jan 21, 2017)

The orange cast is due to the sodium vapor street lamps.  There are probably incandescent, halogens and LED light sources contributing too. Each has a unique color spectrum WB can correct for one type but never all different light sources.


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## stevevp (Jan 21, 2017)

Many thanks again for your advice which explains why I was struggling so much. I'll have another go at it and try the HSL sliders but it just might have to be black and white after all! It would be helpful if I could remember what colour it actually looked like on the night ...


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## Tony Jay (Jan 21, 2017)

Simply put one cannot do white balance corrections on images shot at night in an urban environment lit by several different light sources as is the case in the OP's post.
I am pretty certain that an eye witness to the events photographed would remember the lighting and colours as being reasonably similar to those captured by the camera.

So, photographing in an environment such as that means going with the flow and accepting the varied lighting and colours generated.
It is as it is!

Tony Jay


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## CK_Music (Jan 26, 2017)

I don't know how much you can really "fix" the orange light, as that is the light that the camera captured, but there are probably a few things you could do to lessen it.  If you are shooting in RAW, instead of using the eye dropper, try pulling down the temperature slider slightly until you find a spot that is a nice balance between the orange hue lessening but not going overboard.  This won't work if it is a JPG though as it will just turn it blue.  On top of that you could probably do some corrective work in the HSL and maybe some masks.  I will have a try at it when I get home tonight and see what I can do.

Another thing to try if you have photoshop is to use Nik collection's (it's free, and has some amazing features) Brillance and warmth filter (in colour fx pro) with the slider set slightly to the blue side and brush it on the problem areas using a mask.  I find this is much better than lightroom's temperature slider IF you are editing in JPG and not RAW.


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## RikkFlohr (Jan 26, 2017)

The issue with Sodium Vapor lights that broadcast the orange color is that they are spectrum-limited.  There are specific areas within the color spectrum that are simply not part of the Sodium Vapor output.  High-pressure Sodium lights have a CRI of 44.  That means that less than half the possible visible spectrum is available when using that light. No amount of color correction can replace what isn't there to begin with. 

Color rendering index - Wikipedia


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## Conrad Chavez (Jan 26, 2017)

I decided to take a swing at this; my version's attached. I took two main approaches to the corrections:

Humans don't see a lot of color in low light, so maybe one way to get rid of the distracting color clashes without going all the way to black and white would be to drain most, but not all, of the color. That might approximate how we see in low light anyway.
While increasing Vibrance boosts undersaturated colors more, I think reducing Vibrance also cuts oversaturated colors more. So I thought reducing Vibrance might cut more unwanted colors than Saturation, while leaving more of the "wanted" colors to work with.
Then I went to work, starting from Steve's greenish second version.

White balance shifts were made to get away from the excessive yellow and green.
I dropped Vibrance to -90.
Because so much color was drained out, the picture needed some adjustments to emphasize the content. But with so much color gone, those adjustments needed to be more like the kind you would do to a black-and-white photo, so I concentrated on the tone sliders.
Finally, with most of the picture looking neutral, I realized the remaining yellow color cast spots on the horses could be addressed with some quick Adjustment Brush strokes with the tool set to a blue Temp shift. I also brushed some color (saturation boost) into the face of the horse rider in the foreground. Looks like I could have also taken some blue out of the horses on the right.
In HSL, red and orange were boosted to put some color back into the flags.
No, it's not perfect, but I figured what I got done in 6 minutes might be enough to provide a useful direction for this difficult situation.

(Of course, the Develop settings shown are relative to the JPEG uploaded to the forum, so they'll be different for the raw.)


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## CK_Music (Jan 27, 2017)

Here is what I was able to do.

I took your green image and set the tint slider all the way to +100.

From there I just used the HSL to desaturate the oranges and a bit of blues so that they didn't stand out too much.  It's definitely not perfect, but I only spent 5 minutes at it.  Im sure if you play around with it you can get it somewhere that looks good.  You might not be able to fix it completely but you can definitely make it better!


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## Nbenadom (Jan 27, 2017)

Not a fix for the current image, but something that might be a benefit for future city light nighttime shots would be to use a light pollution filter, such as the L-Pro filter from Optolong. It's designed to cut the wavelengths from man-made light sources. Another option would be to get a red Hoya Intensifier filter.... basically a didymium filter. It'll reduce the yellow light and make it easier to correct in post.


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## stevevp (Jan 27, 2017)

Many thanks to all for your further advice and efforts to improve my photo. I've had a couple more goes and, in the end, I decided to just use an adjustment brush set at +26 Whites and -72 Saturation to take out the worst of the mauve and green/yellow cast, mainly on the horses. This still leaves the image clearly looking like a nighttime shot taken with various lighting and does not introduce new problems such as adjusting the WB does. There's a couple of other bits I'll tidy up when I have time and I've only just noticed the crane in the background which will need to go! I'm still wading through 600+ shots taken in Seville a couple of weeks ago and culling isn't my strong point either!


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## Tony Jay (Jan 27, 2017)

You do realize that it is possible to alter white balance with regional edits (adjustment brush, radial filter, and graduated filter).
The temp and tint slider allow one to do two-dimensional adjustments.


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## stevevp (Jan 29, 2017)

I do realise, but changing the WB, even locally, still seems to have too much of an adverse effect. Local desaturating (is that a word?) seems to be an easier option, at least for me, at this point in my LR learning curve.


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## Tony Jay (Jan 29, 2017)

stevevp said:


> I do realise, but changing the WB, even locally, still seems to have too much of an adverse effect. Local desaturating (is that a word?) seems to be an easier option, at least for me, at this point in my LR learning curve.


All the adjustments can be as subtle or as garish as you like.

The whole endeavour of photography is a creative process. All I have done is widen your creative options.
On an image-by-image basis what works well for one may not be the right answer for another.

If at some stage in the future you seem an image and you think, "I wonder if..." and your mind turns to my suggestion and it works, or even if it doesn't work completely but you nonetheless learn more about the tools in the armamentarium then all is good!

Tony Jay


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## stevevp (Jan 29, 2017)

Thanks Tony. I do experiment quite a lot and frequently avail myself of Lightroom's ability to just go back to the beginning and start again. And again. And again. And ...


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## Tony Jay (Jan 30, 2017)

stevevp said:


> Thanks Tony. I do experiment quite a lot and frequently avail myself of Lightroom's ability to just go back to the beginning and start again. And again. And again. And ...


Yup, that's the way to learn!

Tony Jay


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