Cuckoo - Problems with color balance

I have a series of images like this one that drive me crazy to color balance/correct due to the large greenery that reflects everywhere.
I hope you can do a better job.

Sorry for the large file…

DSC00178.ARW.xmp (15.2 KB)


DSC00178.zip (88.8 MB)

This file is licensed Creative Commons, By-Attribution, Share-Alike.

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Hi @lightlover,

Try Whitebalance as shot.

Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden

Thanks Claes, with WB as shot the skin is awful… :grin: :face_vomiting:

@lightlover I find your version very good. Where do still see problems in your edit?

DSC00178.jpg.out.pp3 (15,8 KB)

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Edit to my taste.

grafik


DSC00178.ARW.xmp (10.0 KB)

Edit: Just a slight update.


DSC00178.ARW.xmp (9.2 KB)

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I think, the skin colors are okay in your edit. Here’s mine with the wb on the white in the eye.


DSC00178.ARW.xmp (7.7 KB)

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I tried a white balance on her shirt and on the white parts of the tree bark which both gave similar results. Then I shifted the tint even a little more towards magenta.


DSC00178_RT.jpg.out.pp3 (15.0 KB)

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So this is my version. I tried mainly to remove the green casts in the skin of the model. For that I used mainly masked color balance RGB.


DSC00178.ARW.xmp (38.0 KB)

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I use RawTherapee, not Darktable, but the tricks I use to remove color casts are

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For sure more work could be done grading this edit of mine but I was focusing on the green cast on the skin tones. The cast and lighting is always subjective to an extent but in any case I just did as @Thomas_Do did and did a spot white balance using the white of the eye. Using the vectorscope as a guide I found that this corrected the hues on the face to a good place but there was still a green cast on the arm and a bit heavier on the chest and in the hair. I used CB and used a parametric mask selecting on hz from the chest. I then set the vectorscope to show a similar area and rotated the hue back up towards red tones to knock down the green. I blurred the mask a bit and you could tweak how much you remove the cast with opacity but I just left it… Other than that just added 2EV and a couple of instances of diffuse…so my work on the cast was simply a spot WB and a small hue correction with CB module…As I said I am sure a lot more could be done with lighting etc…


DSC00178.ARW.xmp (8.6 KB)

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DSC00178.ARW.pp3 (15.4 KB)

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My version…

DSC00178_01.ARW.xmp (24.6 KB)

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Thanks to all guys, I really appreciate your contribution.
Just a few considerations: I was taught that usually when you have to fix colors locally there is probably something wrong globally. I tried to find a global balance that made this image “natural”, but I couldn’t. The point is that here it is really all yellow/green, but this green affects the color of the skin. To have the skin look good, everything else takes on magenta/reddish, which do not reflect the “real” colors or at least that I would expect to see. The only way to get the result I have in mind is to use masks of some kind, as I and others have done. I was hoping to apply a preset to all images in the series, but this is not the case. :slightly_smiling_face:

…but surely that’s what you have to accept if e.g. light is streaming through foliage or reflecting of it.
I’ve tried to get the skin ok without masks.
I’ve written off the background! But I don’t think it adds much anyway.
I think someone said last year that it helps demosaicing to have the colour balance right first, so lately I’ve been trying that, as here. This leads to the white balance warning messages if you also use Color Calibration, but I don’t think that necessarily matters if it gets you what you want (I might be missing something though). Her leg’s gone quite magenta though.

@chaimav , yours has quite a strong colour cast surely?! And I don’t think it’s wise to use raw black point for altering colour!

DSC00178-cuckoo-color-balance-rawconvert-V4-S-sRGB.xmp (45.1 KB)

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For sure that likely creates the problem in the hair going to blue…in that edit

As for your tinkering with WB …AP has done a video on how to optimize the D65 reference values if they are off by shooting a white back ground of your screen and using that image to modify the D65 reference values. By tinkering with them with them continually I am not sure there would be much benefit but if you get results that make you happy then I guess no harm no foul

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DSC00178_02.ARW.xmp (51.4 KB)

darktable 3.8.

EDIT: updated (_02.ARW.xmp) to remove some magenta cast from laptop edit :slight_smile:

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I am not saying that I did the best job, but what is wrong with using Raw Black Point for color cast? It seems to work fairly well for that purpose. Raising the point seems to remove the respective color from the image in a way that the chanel mixer does not. I have not noticed any I’ll effects from doing it.

@chaimav , it was just that you gave tips for avoiding a cast, then showed a pic with a cast!
Raw black points are camera sensor parameters used in demosaicing, they are “technical” settings rather than “artistic” ones and shouldn’t need altering. The manual says “The camera-specific black level of the four pixels in the RGGB Bayer pattern. Pixels with values lower than this level are not considered to contain valid data.” There are plenty other modules designed for getting correct colours!