Critique my colour balance?

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jamiewakeham

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Hi all

OK, so it's taken me a couple of months to get around to scanning and uploading my shots from the Alps trip I did over the winter...

I've stuck a few on my Fotopic account for now. Before I do all the rest, my question is have I got the colour balance right or not? I'd rather know now than after I do all the rest 🙄

The raw scans are really very blue. I've knocked out a lot of this by pulling the saturation of the blue channel down to 50-70%.

Bar the shot of the track leading away with the sunlit mountain in the distance*, they're all from my QL-17, wearing a polorizer (but, critically, no UV filter), on Velvia.

All comments gratefully recieved!

Cheers
Jamie

http://jamiewakeham.fotopic.net/c877312.html
 
Thanks, Jaap. I agree that if I'm to get even vaguely accurate, I'll need to calibrate my monitor... my worry was that they were way too blue regardless! It's hard for me to tell - it certainly is quite blue up there, and I don't know how much is 'right' and how much is just not using a UV filter.

Cheers
Jamie

btw, * should have read 'Spotmatic II, Mir 20m with built-in UV filter'
 
Jamie,
They look a tad blue as you have determined. Typical of a blue sky, snow scene, however.
Pretty country.
Art
 
jaapv said:
Getting back about 100 prints that looked fine on the screen: Totally green,I had to redo all of them :bang: :bang: :bang: That taught me to calibrate the monitor!!
Click to expand...
Having a calibrated monitor is only one part of it. If you don't know how your printer prints those colours then you still may not get what you see on screen. Complete minefield is colour management.
 
aterlecki said:
Having a calibrated monitor is only one part of it. If you don't know how your printer prints those colours then you still may not get what you see on screen. Complete minefield is colour management.
Click to expand...


No problems since (about 750 prints later) :angel:
 
On my TFT monitor colours are not bad. A little little bluish, in my opinion but in my opinion is not disturbing, adds a sense of the cold. By the way beautifull places ! I also shoot Velvia in the snow with no filter. Hope to see more, regards
 
The skin tones look slightly magenta to me; I noticed that before reading that you cut back on the blue channel. Overall look fine, I would not mind a darker blue sky. For a shot with the Polarizer, I would expect the sky to be a deep blue.
 
"The skin tones look slightly magenta to me"

Is this symptomatic of my pulling the blue channel too far down, then? I wonder if I should leave things a little bluer still, in line with Robert's observation that it adds a sense of the cold.

Is there an easy way to restore the colour of the skin tones without altering the snow? I've only just got a copy of Elements v2 and I'm feeling my way around here!

Thanks for your comments, all.

Jamie
 
Do you know what you should do Jamie? Get Ps elements 4 and Scott Kelby's book. Those books are the best there are and it flattened my learning curve considerably.
If you like to stay with PS Elements2 just let me know your adress by PM and I'll send you the Elements2 book, as I am upgrading to 4 anyway! Maybe you missed this scan I posted earlier, as it might help you to compare the blue.
 
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I wish I knew how to restore the skin tones w/o affecting anything else.

How about Posting the original scans There are some photoshop experts here that love working with images to give a "Here's how I did it", "and try this" reply.
 
Brian Sweeney said:
I wish I knew how to restore the skin tones w/o affecting anything else.

How about Posting the original scans There are some photoshop experts here that love working with images to give a "Here's how I did it", "and try this" reply.
Click to expand...

Select the skin-parts with for instance the magic wand, feather the edge 1 or 2 pixels, layer through cut, correct the layer with the hue- slider or levels, and merge visible.
Or: select roughly, make a correction layer, create an opaque layer, set the foreground colour to black, correct the skintones and paint over the areas with the eraser tool in the original layer.

Caveat. I wrote this from memory and have to try it out myself at home before asserting this for 100%.
 
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The truth of the matter is: I'm more at home with assembly language than I am with all this goooeeyyy stuff. In the '80s I used to write my own image processing software in FORTRAN. Mapped RGB into a 3-dimensional histogram and did color analysis on it. Pulled colors into where I wanted them. But I got paid to do it! These days, I scan less and look at prints more often. And my favorite Digital camera does not do color.
 
Jaap, I'll PM you in a minute! I'm just starting to get used to Elements 2, having been a GIMP user for a while. I can't really afford another upgrade, so I'll stick with E2 for a while.

I'm quite happy to post the originals. How should I do so? I'm guessing that Jorge wouldn't be too happy about me putting up a 40MB TIFF; should i just convert an original to JPEG and attach it to a message? How big can I get away with posting?

Jamie
 
The attachments are limited to 1MByte. Resize the image to 1280x1024 (or so), and save in JPEG. Leave the color balance untouched. That will give anyone wanting to assist a big enough image to work with, and post the finished results back to the thread. They should be kind enough to post what they did for the color balance, and you could apply to the original image.

Jaapv: yes I did. I want to see how you do with the posted original!
 
OK - this is another one, set to 1280 pixels wide and saved as JPEG. I'll be fascinated to see what the PS gurus can do with it!

I certainly noticed that, side by side, Jaap's scan had much more impact than mine, and I don't really know why.

Cheers
Jamie
 
Hey, I deleted that one as it was a bit unfair. I said Leica, but that should not make that much of a difference on the monitor. I think that the main difference is the use of levels and contrast control in Photoshop, especially midtone contrast. But, Leica glass does help....
 
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