Removing a Color Cast creates a Color Cast

[BuckSkin]

As per this post

Jul 27, 2022 14:03:41 GMT pontiac1940 said:

These photos seem to have a distinct purple/magenta color cast. Not so much the background but the post and bird. 

Now that it has been mentioned, I can see what you are meaning.

In my investigations and attempts to correct this Magenta cast, I have stumbled upon a quandary.

The very first operation that was performed to the images was the Filter>Blur>Average --- Levels Grey Picker --- color-cast removing trick --- to remove the sick pond-scum-green cast that plagues most Kentucky and Viet Nam photos in summer.

I now read that to correct for Magenta, we must add Green --- so, I figure that Magenta must have been added to correct for the overbearing Green --- and, the abundance of Green in the background accounts for the fact that the Purple is not noticeable in the background.

Is there a way to correct the purple cast without recreating the green cast ?

If someone wants to walk me through this step-by-step, feel free to use any of the images in the thread linked to and post them back here showing the steps.

[pontiac1940]

BuckSkin
I took a quick run at this earlier, and was not so pleased.
I have no magic answer and will try again later tonight or in the morning before mowing the lawns.  
Clive

[BuckSkin]

Jul 28, 2022 3:05:47 GMT pontiac1940 said:

will try again later tonight or in the morning before mowing the lawns. 

Thanks;.....don't get to puzzling over this and chop off a foot or worse.

[fotofrank]

In my Opinion, saying these have a colorcast is putting very mildly. An image with a color cast would have the same color cast across the entire image - these do not. To me they look oversaturated to the point that gray barb wire turned blue and the brown bird(?) went magenta.

Other than selecting parts of the image and desaturating or changing the color I am not sure what else you could do. How where these images taken and processed?

[BuckSkin]

Jul 28, 2022 5:57:15 GMT fotofrank said:

How where these images taken and processed?

Exactly the same as everything else I have posted on this site in the last several months; I don't know what was different with these particular ones.

I revisited them and I think I may have helped them.

I added a Hue/Saturation Layer above everything else and pulled down the Blue, Cyan, and Magenta to -50 for the entire image.

This seemed to get rid of that obvious blue coloring in the barbwire and made it appear more like it really is.

I use that Brazilian barbwire that never ages; thirty-yr-old wire looks the same as new; I cannot recall the brand; it has an orange wrapper.

I have replaced the initial images in the post with my "improved" version.

Thanks for pointing out that the wire was blue.

[pontiac1940]

Jul 28, 2022 9:06:52 GMT BuckSkin said:

Exactly the same as everything else I have posted on this site in the last several months; I don't know what was different with these particular ones.

Some of your earlier photos do display some CA. The is thrasher series was exaggerated. 

Question: (Maybe I missed this.) Do you shoot jpeg and if so what are the camera settings? Is it possible you have one of the special features (scenes, HDR, etc) turned on? 
If you are shooting jpegs, without changing any settings, can you shoot something as it is now set and also shoot it the same thing in RAW? And then post unedited samples of each? 

You might shoot something simple. A bowl of apples, tennis balls or flowers on a table in the sun and in the shade.  

Thanks 

Clive

[BuckSkin]

Jul 29, 2022 3:41:12 GMT pontiac1940 said:

Do you shoot jpeg and if so what are the camera settings?

I only ever shoot RAW and keep all our cameras on "Standard" scene mode whatever...except for the wife's phone photos which are jpegs.

Maybe I need to slow down on running the color-cast corrections on almost everything; maybe that is introducing the problem.

From what I read, you can't correct for one color without introducing it's opposite.

I am not much good with colors anyway; things I think look fine can have problems others can see.

[Sepiana]

Jul 27, 2022 23:26:00 GMT BuckSkin said:

Jul 28, 2022 5:57:15 GMT fotofrank said:

An image with a color cast would have the same color cast across the entire image - these do not. To me they look oversaturated . . 

Is there a way to correct the purple cast without recreating the green cast ?

BuckSkin,

As fotofrank expertly pointed out, this is not a case of color cast. Color cast is when ALL tonal values in an image are shifted. For example, the image will look too blue, or too orange, or too green, etc.  According to Adobe Help, . . .

An unwanted color shift in the whole image, which can be caused by reflected light from a nearby object. For example, many photos taken using fluorescent lighting tend to have a greenish color cast.

Source: Color Cast

What we are seeing here is a case of oversaturation, caused by a Hue/Saturation adjustment in which the sliders were drastically moved to the right.

For us to better help you with this problem, would you please post two screen shots?

One screen shot showing the image as you bring it from the Raw Converter into the Editor. No color cast correction, no saturation adjustments.

Another screen shot showing the results of applying a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer, including a screen shot of the Hue/Saturation dialog showing how you adjusted those sliders.

[hmca]

BuckSkin,

It seems to me that taking, sharing and documenting your pictures brings you and those of us that follow your posts a lot of joy. To me that is what's most important.

Jul 29, 2022 4:55:37 GMT BuckSkin said:

I think look fine

I'd hate to see you get bogged down trying to please the eye of others. So only continue with this pursuit if it is something that is important to you.

[Moby]

Jul 27, 2022 23:26:00 GMT BuckSkin said:

Is there a way to correct the purple cast without recreating the green cast ?

If someone wants to walk me through this step-by-step, feel free to use any of the images in the thread linked to and post them back here showing the steps.

Hi Buckskin.

I totally agree with the other members who said this is not a colour cast issue but a processing issue for the reasons already explained.  You mentioned you shoot raw.  This is good because one of its benefits is that the white balance setting in the camera is not actually baked into the raw data and so you actually set the WB in whatever raw converter you are using.   Setting the correct WB in the raw converter goes a long way to ending up with accurate, good looking colours in the final image. It's not exactly clear to me how you got the final "unusual" colours in the bird, wire and tree stump but things like this are not too difficult to fix.

In this situation I opened up your posted image in ACR and used the WB Tool to reset the WB and colours. I clicked on the, I assume, grey wire and the colours for the bird, wire and tree stump immediately looked much more realistic.  I am assuming that since the bird is a Brown Thrasher, that its feathers on top should be a brownish colour.  I then used a layer mask masking in just the bird with a Hue/Saturation Adjustment layer and a Selective Colour Adjustment Layer that's in Elements+ and PS.

In the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer I bumped up the hue slider on the Master channel and lowered the saturation in the red channel.  In the Selective Color adjustment layer I adjusted the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black sliders for the reds to fine tune the brown coloured feathers.  On my monitor I now have nice looking brown colours in the feathers.

[Chris]

Buckskin, I always appreciate your wonderful pictures of nature and wildlife. Keep up the good work.

I would be interested to learn how you are processing this raw image. Are you using the PS Elements editor or PS Elements Adobe camera raw?

Before you do any major tweaking, does the "Auto colour" feature in Adobe camera raw or the Edit /Auto colour correction in the PS editor help?

Is the chest of the bird white with black streaks. If that is the case, then you can use the eye dropper tool in ACR to click on a white part of the image and that will fix the problem. If the whole picture is over saturated you will need to lower the saturation.

Kind regards
Chris