I use processing apps for particular purposes. I’m relatively a novice, and I’m not one to start at the beginning of the manual and work through it start to finish. More to my liking is a procedure where I find specific solutions for specific problems. Is there a good reference for processing apps (all of them - like darktable, rawtherapee. etc) - that has recipes for certain tasks?
For instance, I very often run into photos that are badly shot in tungsten light, or a combination of LED and tungsten light. Especially problematic are the rouge-red photos. It seems impossible to “get the red out.” So, is there a recipe-style resource for attacking such a problem in darktable or rawtherapee or natron?
If you often have photos with light and color issues I recommend shooting in RAW and using a RAW developer, Darktable or Rawtherapee.
First step in a RAW developer is modifying the whitebalance.
One step before using the computer you could use a grey card when you shoot; this eases the process of getting a good whitebalance afterwards on the computer
Another thing that helps with artificial lighting is the use of a proper camera input profile. Even though they are not made specifically for artificial lights, good DCP profiles help.
Interesting problem. I’ve recently dealt with similar with my new camera, which doesn’t have built-in flash. I do a lot of family photos in our dining room, which is rather heavily tungsten-lit but has a large patio door that lets in a good amount of sunlight. With the old camera I’d shoot during the day with daylight, sometimes turning off the dining room lights (to my wife’s consternation…), and transitioning to flash at and after sunset, which also balanced to daylight. With new camera, I tried a few events with the ambient room light; got good exposures, but the mix in light was garish. My solution is to go back to the old camera w/flash for the time being, and research hotshoe-mounted flash units for the new camera. Really, your best bet is to control the lighting to start with.
That said, I look at some of the tungsten-balanced images with garish blue portions of daylight-lit exterior, and wonder how to construct a tool to, say, take a patch from one of the daylight-lit bluish surfaces, walk the whole image, and either recolor or desaturate pixels that approached the color of the patch. Or maybe, such a tool or combination exists in GIMP?
Thanks for the reply. I agree that getting the light right upfront is the best mode of operation. Lately, I’ve had so much trouble getting the white balance to work. Maybe it’s the camera. I need to send it in for repairs anyway, because the mirror-box is out of whack (have to de-focus to get focus LOL).