What will happen if you white balance on the girls’ teeth?
Next to nothing on the first one and a more serious blue overload on the 2nd one.
Eye white no real change on either. What white is white. It has all sorts of shades and this wasn’t shot in a studio.
Why didn’t you just try it ?
John
Thanks so much, @Ajohn. I really like your last development (after working on the file with fotoxx) and I need to investigate it more. I still wonder if it’s possible to get a similar result without shading all corners. I agree that maybe I was aiming for a development that is slightly too bright, but that’s how I remember that evening. Anyway, something a little darker could work as well. I’m not sure what went wrong with my color profile. In the past I had problems with Adobe’s profiles so I tried to avoid them. Thanks also to @patdavid for the suggestions.
1 Like
I won’t develop the photo for you but I will point a few things out.
The photo is clearly not lit by incandescent light. It looks mostly fluorescent with LED or plasma highlights. The RT version is too green, as is to be expected from fluorescent light. It’s also too yellow. Regardless of DCP, wrong white balance seems to be the main problem. Fix the white balance and, if possible, make a DCP for that light.
Use curves.
I don’t see any CA issues in that screenshot sample.
Her teeth and shirt were not white under that light. You could make them white using the WB picker, and sometimes the result is good, but sometimes bad. But what I would try is to pick a white balance spot on her white shirt for the sole sake of fixing the green WB level, and then manually increase the temperature so that the shirt looks warmer again, non-white. That way you get warm-looking colors, as is expected, but without the horrendous yellow-green cast as in the first RT screenshot. If you try that, pick a spot which is clearly unaffected by the purple light, such as from the white shirt on her back.
1 Like
Of note, I used retinex for some gentle tonemapping, and HH (hue by hue) LAB curve to adjust the skin tones (sacrificing the yellow shop lights), and tone curves, plus RTs auto white balance.
P9040307.ORF.pp3 (10.2 KB)
2 Likes
I thought I would have another play and not use anything but rawtherapee. I only did last time through habit.
As this is mixed lighting I tried several of it’s built in white balances. Several of them worked reasonably well but no better than auto. This time I used the cie colour appearance model and did most of the adjustments in that using the curve to set contrast in the ladies and also to damp down the bright parts in the background. The image is rather soft so in order to apply sharpening I used the noise removal section and then 3 rad sharpening. I might use 5 on an image like this full sized but 3’s RT’s max.
P9040307.ORF.pp3 (6.0 KB)
If you make a copy of the pp3 and have a play with the points on the curve you will see what they do. In this case the subject is all in the bottom half. You can also alter a couple of other things in the cie panel. If you don’t keep a renamed copy RT will overwrite it when you exit it and the curve adjustments are pretty sensitive.
I still think a vignette that can’t obviously be seen would help. Also point out that the Olympus 25mm F1.8 is a better lens than the one you used but like all lenses this fast still a bit weak wide open.
Just thought I also used camera standard from raw rather than an Abobe camera profile. I does generally work well but it can be worth trying one of the pofiles.
John
1 Like
Mixed lightning and overexposed background is not easy to master. I’m not familiar with RT yet, so I’ve tried to combine two tools that I know a bit better just to see if some satisfying results can be made.
Here is my work flow with darktable and GIMP:
darktable:
-dimmed highlights a bit, enhanced exposure (using parametric masks in exposure module) and reduced ISO noise.
GIMP:
- I duplicated layer and made some white balance on that layer (with teeth from girl in the right as white point)
- with hue-saturation tool reduced saturation of blue and pink colour on same layer and played a bit with transparency to settle big differences between that and original layer
- merged both layer and duplicated resulting layer again
- on duplicated layer used “detect skin” tool from GMIC plug-in (colour module) to isolate skin parts of the picture
- on skin selection layer enhanced a bit lightning of the skin
- merged layer again and played a bit with curves tool
- added vignette to dim highlights a bit more (added black layer above original layer and applied masks with blend tool)
Excuse me for my bad English I hope that you can understand the steps I described above.
Result:
2 Likes
Perhaps a bit OT, but instead of savaging the HL than bring nuthin to the image, to the cute girls and the little guy, another possible approach would be cropping and embracing the blown-ups, the CAs, the neon mistress and all in between 
Hope you don’t mind the messing around, they were too inviting =)
PD
a square crop at the ladies’ arms (and forgetting the joint’s heresy) would emphasise their expression even more
1 Like
If the OP wants something lighter all he need do is adjust the lightness, contrast and chroma sliders in the cie panel. The skin toning can be changed with chroma also probably vibrance keeping it simple.
I did add a vignette this time but suspect that the GIMP would give more control on that. The far end of the curve could be dragged down more. The curve could also be used to play more with contrast again but once it’s more or less right it’s usually easier to use sliders to finish things off.
P9040307.ORF.pp3 (6.0 KB)
The lighting problem can be seen easily. There is a rather blue light some way to the front of the ladies and by the look of it off to one side - see the blue in the white dress, skin and hair in places. Sometimes artificial materials can do this sort of thing in photo’s but not usually hair and skin. Mixed fabrics can be a real pain on the same person but this shot doesn’t have that problem either.
John.
As far as I can see it the essential problem with this image is that the two ladies are lit by mixed light (both purpleish and greenish from different angles). That does look ugly on a photograph IMO. The olympus color rendition does handle this quite nicely indeed. Here is what I would do (in darktable and not RT):
P9040307.ORF.xmp (12.2 KB)
In short: I accept the purple light and try to balance away the green light to some extent. I fixed up some of the remaining green skin with the colorzones module. To deal with the exposure I used a simple luminance mask. The result is IMO acceptable but not great.
If you have the opportunity just try to avoid accidental mixed light on people, then you won’t have to fight it in post.
2 Likes
I’m taking that and framing it! 
I found that the image looks okay when left at a warmer WB setting; the green isn’t as objectionable when it’s predominantly red.
Here’s my take on it (in Filmulator, not RawTherapee). When I cancel out more of the redness, it goes back to looking an ugly green.
The white balance works well but it’s still not exposed for the faces.
I also gave the image another try, mainly bumped the exposure
1 Like
Or go black and white. 
1 Like
Thanks again to all who contributed to this thread.
First of all, let me say that I’m well aware of the painful mixed light in this scene and I didn’t expect to see miracles from the RAW converter. Yet, mixed light and backlit subjects are part of life and my point in posting the OP was to use this picture to learn how to deal with these issues.
Backlit subject - I find John’s attempt to be the most successful one in lifting the shadows while protecting the highlights. However, upon further inspection in RT, I see that the shadows were lifted using the Highlights/Shadows tool, which unfortunately adds tons of noise to the dark areas, which consequently require very aggressive NR. Another problem with this tool is that it isn’t applied uniformly to uniformly dark areas. For example, the edges of the black shirt are darker than the center of it in this development, and also the areas around the chain. Too much color noise too. This is John’s result that I’m talking about:
I spent time trying different combinations of the sliders Black, Lightness, Contrast, and curves, but didn’t manage to balance the exposure in the sense of lifting the shadows to the extent shown above while protecting the highlights and maintaining good contrast in the overall look of the image. I’m sure it is possible, since John has just shown that such look can be obtained, but it was done using a tool that adds too much noise and introduces strange artifacts as on the black shirt.
Colors - I didn’t use the Adobe standard profile because it caused me problems in other cases, and the same goes for Adobe’s profiles for Olympus color modes. Perhaps there’s a problem with the profile I created. I’ll try to get back to the place one evening and create a new profile for the same point of view. Regarding the harsh transitions I talked about in the OP, and the general ‘plastic’ look I got in the beginning, I see that it can be much better when a warmer WB is used, but that’s not necessarily the nicest WB to set for this image. Maybe this problem will be solved when I have a better profile. Anyway, I don’t think there’s much to improve in terms of the WB setting. It’s a compromise given the mixed light (in the foreground and in the background).
Thanks again to all contributors.
1 Like
Thank you for sharing this and for kicking off a great discussion of various approaches to a common problem! At the very least there were some great tips and pieces of advice for a problem that I’m sure many folks face fairly commonly.
The solution is to cheat: go black and white. You might agree that it makes the noise reduction issue easier to solve. I used three tone curves, each to cope with one issue or another.
P9040307rt-BW.jpg.out.pp3 (10.5 KB)
Just for interest. I took the last one I posted and altered the basic lightness and contrast exposure sliders. Altered the colour temperature a bit, changed the skin tone protection value in contrast by detail level and selected Adobe’s portrait camera profile which in my view did improve the skin toning. After saving from RT I opened it up in Fotoxx and did my usual post reduction unsharp mask rad 2 strength in this case 25 as I feel this is a weakness in RT - not being able to set sharpness levels in a reduced shot. Doesn’t make much difference on this one but that’s not always the case. The same thing could be checked / done in the GIMP.
P9040307.ORF.pp3 (6.1 KB)
I always adjust on a near black background but hopefully this one will be brighter on the default white on here. Something the board might want to think about.
John
There’s some discussion on that here:
(I’ve had a go at this image but haven’t been able to get a result I’m happy with yet.)
I’ve never had any problems reading posts on this forum David
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/forums/latest.php
They provide an option on how things look in this respect as well but most use the default. I find it a touchy area and have often been tempted to try and get some OS developers to allow me to set it myself. There can be a problem. Fotoxx once went dead black - Great but at times it was impossible to see the edges of shots. Something I have never noticed on that particular forum but if it happens a frame would soon sorts that out.
I could have several more goes at this image but think the last one isn’t too bad. Maybe a touch brighter than I would like but that seems to be what was wanted. Hopefully the pp3 files will help the poster with their adjustments in future. I’d guess your PP may be better than mine.