Custom White Balance in Horrible Light

Not sure if this is the correct area of the Forum, but here goes.

I have been shooting indoor basketball. The light, well, is less than desired. The first few games, I used AWB, things came out a bit cool. The next few games, after some research, did the Custom White balance.

I walked out to the key, put down a piece of white paper, filled an entire frame, then did the Custom White Balance in my 7D.

The problem/issue I have is the Custom White Balance is too good - the pictures, well, have the nasty color temperature of the gym (as it should!).

Here's my question - in post processing, would you process pictures as the colors appeared (nasty and yellowish), or would you tinker with the photos to get a pleasant color that wasn't seen at the gym?

I'd do the last. Personally, regarding WB generally, reality isn't everything. Would we try to make a sunset neutral? The "Correct" WB may not be the "Right" WB for a image. Remember, you're the judge of your own image, & if your monitor, browser, & post processing utility are properly calibrated & color managed, I think it's more useful to adjust by eye for a pleasing image.

Here's an example of the nastiness.

HTTP response: 404 | MIME changed to 'text/html' | Byte size: ZERO

I myself was pleasantly surprised last week when I went to shoot at a Native American Powwow held in a mid-school gymnasium. I left my 5DC and my 1D3 in AWB, just out of habit from being a long-time Raw shooter, and was impressed that when I got my images uploaded they did not, to my eye, require WB correction (or have any artifacts from shooting under flourescent lights)!

Maybe they have "good" lighting or maybe I was just lucky?

Here are a couple shots from the afternoon with, like I said, no color correction:

5D, AWB

Effectivepull wrote in post #12014982
Here's an example of the nastiness.

Looks like Sodium Vapor Lamp lighting No help for that, but you could change it using levels/curves and the gray/midtone dropper. Can't say how well it would turn out. Sodium Vapor lamps suck for photography.

Here's a quick stab at it. Still looks horrid to me, but better. It might fly

HOSTED PHOTO
please log in to view hosted photos in full size.

HOSTED PHOTO
please log in to view hosted photos in full size.

drdeisil1 - the one on the right is way off. Whites are blue.

Sean van Tonder wrote in post #12016013
drdeisil1 - the one on the right is way off. Whites are blue.

Yeah, but it's all I was able to get from the photo with the dropper.

I guess it could be adjusted further with an HSL mask.

HOSTED PHOTO
please log in to view hosted photos in full size.

HOSTED PHOTO
please log in to view hosted photos in full size.

Effectivepull wrote in post #12014982
Here's an example of the nastiness.

HTTP response: 404 | MIME changed to 'text/html' | Byte size: ZERO

I don't see any nastiness. The white uniforms are not too far off and need only a slight tweak. If you turn on Editing OK I will show you my correction.

Don't think the original is that bad color-wise. What would really help is if the girl or woman throwing the shot was in really sharp focus with the two blocking more out of focus.

Since the uniforms and backgrounds look OK, what about using masks and color adjustment layer to just try and tweak just the skin tones instead of color correcting the whole image which is difficult.

Please forgive me if it's not uber sharp focus. Still working on my photography skills - this was the 4th basketball game I've ever shot.

"Editing OK" turned on. Edit away!

Effectivepull wrote in post #12018146
Please forgive me if it's not uber sharp focus. Still working on my photography skills - this was the 4th basketball game I've ever shot.

No need for that. Shooting fast moving action is a b@tch and taxes the skills of any man, pro or not and equipment. So don't apologize...just keep shooting, yeah.

There is a cast that is not so obvious in the uniform white, but in the skin tones - it is a sickly yellow-green cast that makes skin look not nice. I don't know how tan or rosy these ladies are, but they are not a waxy greenish yellow.

I made a small adjustment with Lab curve, targeting the "neutralish" white shorts shown highlighted in the orange circle in the figure. In the figure, the original JPEG is left, the edited is right. The curves show a small shift in "a" away from green toward magenta and a larger shift in "b" away from yellow toward blue. This could probably be achieved similarly in LR, with the color temp slider (i.e., the yellow-blue axis) and the tint slider (the green-magenta axis). Then you could sync this WB tweak across all of the images and be done with it.

Kirk

HOSTED PHOTO
please log in to view hosted photos in full size.

Wow, kirkt! Looks much better! Thank you all so much for your input. I've learned yet another thing about PS!

How would any of you handle this situation if you had to get the images (about 20) to the client within an hour of the game? I shot w/ Custom WB, JPEG + RAW and shuttled the JPEGS off to the client. The images were OK but obviously, because of time constraints, I couldn't get them all perfect before they had to go off.

Not to get side tracked but regarding focus - I shot the image at 4000 ISO (on a Canon 7D) so it was a bit grainy. I ran it through Nik Define to reduce noise. Perhaps that reduced sharpness? Or am I making excuses?

I'd say it depends on what you need to do in that half hour. Camera Raw could make pretty quick work on the color corrections, noise reduction an sharpening and get 20 jpegs out the door pretty quickly, but if you need Photoshop stuff the best thing would be actions that did certain things and that "wrapped things up" quickly. The Image Processor can also be run through Bridge, which could work nicely.