Managing Colour.

Exercise: Managing colour.

I had a bit of a problem with this exercise as I don't have many images with horrendous colour casts.  The three I have used have colour problems and I have done what I can to correct them.

The first is of orphan elephants in Sri Lankan.  The colour is washed out rather than having a cast and there is considerable highlight clipping.  My aim was to warm up the image and add a bit of contrast.

The first change was to WB where I went from as taken to cloudy.  Alterations to exposure and recovery got rid of almost all the clipping warnings.  Use of the black, brightness, and contrast sliders gave me the contrast and brightness I wanted, and slight changes to vibrancy and saturation further enhanced the colour.  It went from a washed out snap to a pleasing picture.  If I were to be using this elsewhere I would crop it quite tightly.

I took the next image at last year's Deal Braderie, which is an annual street market where anyone can set up a stall for the day.  I came across these hands that appeared to be playing an imaginary piano.  It was  a dull day with seemed to suck the colour out of everything.  My aim was, as above, to inject some life into the colours and enhance the grain of the wood.

I carried out pretty much the same procedures as above but with the addition of the specific colour sliders to pick out the grain of the table and the flags at the back.  

The last one has real colour cast problems.  It is Deal pier and beach on a snowy morning.  The snow is picking up the blue of the sky overhead while the sea and pier are catching the warm colours of the rising sun.  This was only ever going to be a compromise but I wanted to see what could be done.  The sky also shows a large amount of clipping

I applied a huge amount of recover to get rid of most of the clipping.  Use of the light fill, black, and brightness sliders looked after the contrast while a change to cloud cured much of the colour cast.  I reduced the vibrancy and slightly increased the saturation.  It may not look it in the image but I have readings on the DCM of pretty close to grey from the snow.