Still having WB issues and color cast taking over ...

Not sure how to present this, or if this is even in the right place. I decided to shoot a pic of my wife in a park area yesterday while we were out hiking. We were surrounded by green foilage. Used flash, and my wife is sporting nice a green cast to her skin. Everything else looks good.

Is this something an 18% gray card (like a WhiBal) would/could correct for me?

Also, I'm seeing the same thing shooting pics of football players with red jerseys. The sun reflects the red into the faces leaving a nice 'rosey' cast on everything including white pants, jersey trim, faces and skin.

Now, let me ask this: If there is a natural green cast to my first example due to being surrounded by foilage, grass and trees on all sides and a rosey cast caused by a red jersey being reflected onto a player's face, would an 18% gray card accurately duplicate the green and red cast which is actually happening? Or, is it supposed to correct such an issue?

I'm really confused about the type of WB 'accuracy' an 18% gray card CAN deliver. Would it correct for colorcast, or accurately reproduce what is truly happening?

For me, this is becoming a case of everyone sees and hears things a little differently!

dave

If the subject is holding the card, it would have the same cast from reflective surfaces and the eyedropper would cancel it. You might be able to convince your wife to hold the card and sit still through multiple shots, but I'm not sure about the football player.

tzalman wrote in post #10864230
If the subject is holding the card, it would have the same cast from reflective surfaces and the eyedropper would cancel it. You might be able to convince your wife to hold the card and sit still through multiple shots, but I'm not sure about the football player.

tzalman,

thanks for your explanation. I do shoot RAW files and can adjust WB, but some of what comes up in real life is difficult to overcome given my limited use of PSE7.

Must get WhiBal card!

dave

If/when the green cast was 'corrected', anything in 'normal' light will go to the magenta side. So correcting for the red shirt as you shoot won't work, either.
Not easy to do, but IF you knew how green the influence from the trees was, you could put the same intensity green filter on the strobe so the important light would all be the same amount of green, & a custom WB would be able to correct for that.
CC filters

If you can't overpower the light & reflections you have there with something like an umbrella, you need to WB for the most important part of the image. Then you could correct any details in pp, maybe with an Adjustment Layer: Post #9:
Airport runway shoot
If the umbrella was a bit higher than the face, the reflection from the red shirt should be directed mostly down away from the face? I haven't tried that.

A couple shots have flash fill. Notice the detail in the black coat & white boa.
Angeline outdoors

snyderman wrote in post #10864102
I decided to shoot a pic of my wife in a park area yesterday while we were out hiking. We were surrounded by green foilage. Used flash, and my wife is sporting nice a green cast to her skin. Everything else looks good.

The problem is the flash has one color temperature, and the foliage/background has a different color temperature. So if you get the face looking good, you'll get a color cast for everything else.

Do you want your wife to look good? Or the trees?

This is the same "problem" with using flash to illuminate a subject in a room lit by tungsten lighting. The background will be all out of whack if you correct the flash-lit subject.

I think you need to correct the skin tones independent of the surroundings. As others have mentioned, if you make a global adjustment to fix the skin, that will affect other colors. Try a curves adjustment layer, and use the mask to restrict the color correction to the skin.

But a grey card held by the model and shot with the flash in the same position as the "real" shot will have the same mixture of lighting on it and will display the same deviation from neutral. However, it is true that "accurate" WB and WB that produces pleasing skin tone can be two very different things.

Also - the green light falling on the subject as a result of the surrounding foliage is not necessarily a "cast", per se, but a result of the surrounding modifying the light provided by the sun. If you make a correction to that light, you will necessarily make a correction to the surroundings as well. If you want to preserve both the surrounding foliage and the natural "typical" skin tones, you will need to make two white balance adjustments. The skin tone adjustment will likely succeed if based on a WB target placed at the subject's location, catching all of the incident light, including the flash, the daylight tinted by the foliage, etc. You can use one corrected RAW conversion for the skin tones of the subject based on this WB. Then, WB again for the light that is actually illuminating the subject - based on the combination of daylight and flash, it sounds like you can play around with these presets and then tweak to taste to WB for the environment (the foliage, etc.). Then you can composite these two images in post.

As for the football player example, the color bleed you are getting from incident light hitting the jersey and reflecting onto the player's face is a highly localized adjustment that definitely needs to be made with a local adjustment tool like brushes in LR or layers in PS. That is not a WB issue but one of locally adjusting the color because of its effects on the surrounding skin tone, etc. In either case (the foliage or the football jersey) you are making a decision as to whether or not you want to preserve or eliminate reflected or modified ambient light, for aesthetic or other reasons. So, in either case, you WB could be spot on, but the reflected light, modified from the source to some other color, is creating a "cast" different than the source illumination cast for which you originally WB'ed. Irwin M. Fletcher, you choose.

Fun stuff eh?

Kirk

Hey, there's another fun thing to try if you are using LR or CS4/5 (don't know about Aperture 3) -- use a local adjustment brush set to decrease saturation and use the color picker to choose a color (green/red) that matches the reflected color, and brush over the face! It could be easy!

Also, the subject is probably closer to the flash than the foliage. Adjusting the subject may have a minimal effect upon the background.

snyderman wrote in post #10864487
I do shoot RAW files and can adjust WB, but some of what comes up in real life is difficult to overcome given my limited use of PSE7.

Why don't you post a sample of the problem so you can learn how to fix it? It has to be done in post-processing.