Is this the right way to cover up stage lighting?

Covering a great Blues show over the weekend, I had a hard time adjusting for the stage lighting. The people running the show wanted to use alot of Reds and Oranges.

After a few hours of fooling around in photochop, the only thing I could really do to make the pictures look good without having a funky tint to them, was to hit 'Greyscale' and pull all the color out of them.

Does anyone know any tricks to combat the nasty stage lighting we find at some shows?

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Shoot in RAW and get your white balance sorted in PP so that you get the skin tones correct.

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That was my next question, I had the camera set to AWB. After trying numerous settings, I just figured I'd leave it on auto.

I wasnt sure if anyone had a way to adjust for the funky stage lighting with all the changing colors?

AWB im afraid is about the worset thing you could do.
The best is shooting in RAW and then white balancing it afterwards in a program like capture one. But alternativelyu, if you do shoot in jpeg, set the white balance to 'tungsten' as this is the sort of bulb you'll find in stage lights.

It is by no means perfect, but it's much better and it'll look a bit more realistic.

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Why do you want to change the stage lighting? Isn't that what the performers want - and what gives it the unique atmosphere?

what i assume he means is get it as close to reality as the eye can see, and that means realistic skin tones which is achieved through good w/b
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tipsy wrote in post #3326975
what i assume he means is get it as close to reality as the eye can see, and that means realistic skin tones which is achieved through good w/b
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"as close to reality" would be what stage lights were on the performer. It is rare to see "proper" skin tones in this type of photography.

Now if you had the wrong setting or the images are oversaturated because of the way the sensor is more sensitive to colors then that is another thing.

Adjusting white balance is not real difficult if shot in RAW, it can be done with a jpeg file as well, just more difficult.

My photo editing software won't handle RAW, but I've found that adjusting the individual color balances sometimes (strong emphasis there) works pretty well...

I wouldn't ever want to cover up the lighting - without the lighting I wouldn't have photos.

Stage lighting can and does do tricky things to the images we take.

The points about shooting RAW and getting the appropriate white balance settings are very useful.

I find the use of EC can minimise some of the degrading effects some stage lights cast on images and when post processing I don't have a magic rule I use a myriad of techniques to turn the RAW file into a final image I am happy with. I don't try to chase natural skin tones as a rule - most of the time the lighting effects change that anyway and I am not slavish about trying to make the final photo appear as I saw the performer on stage - I look to extract the best finished image I can; in my style - after all that's what the art of photography is about.

AWB doesn't do well with red imho. Shoot RAW and use Tungsten or Kelvin (as low as it will go) in camera to avoid clipping reds, and then adjust further in PP. Custom WB would probably work too, but I've never really tried it.

bacchanal wrote in post #3327495
Shoot RAW and use Tungsten or Kelvin (as low as it will go) in camera to avoid clipping reds, and then adjust further in PP. Custom WB would probably work too, but I've never really tried it.

I may be wrong here, but as far as i was aware, RAW files dont store any of the in camera WB settings, it's ALL done in PP. So when shooting RAW, what white balance your camera is set on makes no difference aside from for the small jpeg files in camera on the displace lcd.

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I'm sure that could be true, but you can see where the red channel is clipping on the RGB histogram easier if you get the WB as close as possible in camera, in my experience anyway.

tipsy wrote in post #3329285
I may be wrong here, but as far as i was aware, RAW files dont store any of the in camera WB settings, it's ALL done in PP. So when shooting RAW, what white balance your camera is set on makes no difference aside from for the small jpeg files in camera on the displace lcd.

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You need to study, you are way off.

So RAW Does take into account the in camera WB settings?

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Quotes from Creativepro.com

Images in the Raw
To understand how raw image capture is valuable, let's look at how digital cameras usually process images. Your digital camera captures an image by exposing its image sensor -- either a CCD or CMOS chip -- to light, just as a film camera captures an image by exposing a piece of film to light. The image sensor is covered with a grid of millions of "photosites." Each photosite corresponds to a single pixel in your final image.

To capture color, each photosite is covered with a single color filter. Some cameras use a combination of red, green, and blue filters while others use cyan, magenta, and yellow. Though each photosite can only capture a single color, an on-board computer uses complex interpolation schemes to calculate the correct color for each pixel by analyzing all of the surrounding pixels.

That same internal computer then adjusts the image according to the white-balance setting you have chosen, in addition to applying any other exposure, sharpening, or color-correction features that the camera may provide.

Once the image has been tweaked and adjusted by the camera, it is JPEG-compressed and then saved to the camera's media card.

When shooting in Raw mode, however, the camera skips most of these steps. Instead of interpolating the color data and processing the image, it simply stores the raw data that comes directly off the CCD.

END QUOTE

So to me, that translates that RAW files do not store any in camera processing details such as the WB setting...

Where has my thinking gone wrong taygull? This information seems to confirm what i thought.

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