Help with WB (concert photos)

Hi I'm looking for some enlightenment having just had my mind blown.

I've always shot raw as long as I've been shooting digital and have just returned home from shooting a gig. I leave my WB on daylight as I know I can adjust in raw and due to the stage lights and strobes there's no reason to do otherwise.

First run through my photos in Lightroom and I'm cursing the blue lighting and trying to warm things up.

Maxing out the WB still leaves me with band members looking like smurfs. So I'm about to call it a night (almost 1am here in the UK) when I pull up LR mobile and export one of the images to my phone so share with someone.

A quick auto WB adjustment in Snapseed has the photo looking a million times better than it did on my expensive computer and editing software. I know this is due to it now being a jpg but i didn't expect there to be that much leway in the file.

My long winded question is why is there a limit to how warm or cold I can make my image in LR when clearly there is scope for it to go warmer and look better?

Do I have to round trip them into Photoshop or onto my phone so Incan edit them in snapseed?

Colored spotlights may well exceed the color temp range available in the camera or software. On top of that you are trying to balance lights that don't contain a full spectrum of colors. If there is no red in the source then you can magically add it in post. This is a common problem for indoor sports where sodium or halide vapor lights are not full spectrum. You can just hope to get close, or at least get an effect that's pleasing if not balanced.

So essentially I'd have to export them all in LR to jpg then increase the temperature from there?

Could you host the raw file somewhere, for us to play with?

Try this
https://www.dropbox.co​m …tgk2MfesREbeGDi​KzPPa?dl=0

I've just seen them on the larger screen in this thread and both images are not brilliant by my question is that the 1st one was as warm as I could make it LR. The second was after running through snapseed on my phone.

Thanks

LR is not a very robust raw converter, especially when you need full control of raw conversion. It adds contrast and exposure to the raw data without your approval or control, and its white balance model is, as you have found out, limited to images that are typically shot under common lighting conditions.

Attached are a couple of renditions of your raw file illustrating your situation - heavy blue lighting. One decision you would need to make, regardless of which raw converter you use, is how you want to render the scene. In this case, the lighting was likely very blue for aesthetic reasons and you may want to maintain that blue lighting to emphasize the mood or whatever the intent of the lighting designer was for that moment. The white balance operation is really one of scaling the exposure of the linear raw data in each channel (R, G1, G2, B) prior to rendering the color. In the raw converter I used, Raw Photo Processor, the white balance for the image is not expressed in terms of correlated color temperature (°K) but in terms of additional exposure added to (or subtracted from) the raw data in each channel. As you can appreciate, the "Auto" white balance subtracted almost 2 stops of exposure from the blue channel (see the orange arrow in the screenshot) - while this demonstrates what the image would look like under neutral lighting (i.e., literal white balance) it is probably not what you would want for the final image because it completely eliminates the blue lighting. The second example subtracts about half a stop from the blue channel (relative to the "As Shot" WB - daylight) to get rid of some of the clipping that the blue channel was creating and gives a good starting point for further image manipulation. The third image is the "As Shot" image. In all of the images, I added 1.3 stops of exposure and rolled the highlights off a little bit so the transition to pure clipping in the highlights was more gentle.

Yes you can WB after the raw file has been converted to an RGB image, but sheesh, what a pain. A lot of people use LR and ACR - perhaps many images do not challenge the conventional processing model Adobe has contrived and Adobe has apparently constrained their processing controls - maybe Adobe thinks their users cannot handle the full power of raw processing, so they dumb it down for their users? I don't know. Either that or they are doing so much cooking of the file under the hood that extreme moves in the processing model will break the image in the context of their cooking the image. In any event, the ACR/LR raw converter model completely breaks down when attempting to get an even remotely decent conversion of this file.

Kirk

As Shot rendering. This gives you an idea of the WB coefficients for you daylight WB setting.

kirk

Thanks Kirk thats useful to know I'll check out that raw converter. IS there a way to round trip the file from LR as I use that for all my cataloguing too.

RPP is mac-only, so that may end your investigation right there. As far as LR > RPP > LR, see:

https://www.raw-photo-processor.com/RPP/Over​view.html

and read through the user manual. There appears to be some integration, but I have never used it. See:

https://youtu.be/KP8tt​Cf7HRE

By the looks of the webpage, RPP appears to be outdated, but it is in constant development and addition of new cameras, etc. Here is the link to the most current version:

https://www.raw-photo-processor.com/RPP/RPP6​4_1890Beta.zip

Another raw converter that has this kind of WB is Raw Therapee, which is PC-Mac-Linux native. It has a dizzying array of controls though, so it may not be everyone's cup of tea.

Kirk

I'm on Mac, have downloaded and had a play.

It does seem there is some interaction with LR by way of the plugin that is made available once you donate to the program.

This allows exporting directly to RPP and then you can save back to LR in a fashion it's not as simple as when doing it with PS as it just opens the import dialogue box to import the TIFF.

Thanks again

skotbites wrote in post #18947394
So essentially I'd have to export them all in LR to jpg then increase the temperature from there?

No. Sometimes you can't fix it.

If the actual lighting was heavily colored by the use of gels, why the need to render a 'neutral' rendition of the scene?...it is not a portrayal of the reality of the scene as shot!

It is one thing to render 'neutral' a light which appears to the eye as 'white' although its WB value is significantly deviated from Daylight. But it is something completely different, in my mind, when the lighting is deliberately colored some hue other than perceived 'white'.

BTW, the bassist's white collar (assuming it is a white shirt) does balance to white when the WB value is 50000K, but the lead singer's skin still is heavily colored even at that setting.
At left is the photo As Shot with WB 5200K (dayllight), at right is the shot with WB set to 50000K and -150 in the Green-Magenta axis. Not much difference...an indicator it is not simply a WB color temperature issue!

Depending on how you intend to use the photos, B&W is always an option.

Wilt wrote in post #18947634
If the actual lighting was heavily colored by the use of gels, why the need to render a 'neutral' rendition of the scene?

Was wondering the same thing myself.

Wilt wrote in post #18947634
If the actual lighting was heavily colored by the use of gels, why the need to render a 'neutral' rendition of the scene?...it is not a portrayal of the reality of the scene as shot!

It is one thing to render 'neutral' a light which appears to the eye as 'white' although its WB value is significantly deviated from Daylight. But it is something completely different, in my mind, when the lighting is deliberately colored some hue other than perceived 'white'.

BTW, the bassist's white collar (assuming it is a white shirt) does balance to white when the WB value is 50000K, but the lead singer still is heavily colored even at that setting.
At left is the photo As Shot with WB 5200K (dayllight), at right is the shot with WB set to 50000K and -150 in the Green-Magenta axis. Not much difference!

There is no need, maybe I want to. I was purely pointing out that LR can't do that and yet a phone app (and RPP) can.