Critique my colour balance?

Fair enough, Jaap 🙂

Like I said, I'll be most interested to see what someone who actually knows what to do with PS can make of that unaltered JPEG. Whilst I'm ok with technology (you'd have to hope so, given that they have me teaching ICT GCSE this year...) I have yet to get to grips with PS yet.

Cheers
Jamie
 
The 1-Minute Photoshop treatment.

1) Remove the black border as to not confuse auto-level
2) Auto-Level
3) Adjust: Color Balance: Mid-Tones, shift -40 toward yellow away from Blue.

All else left the same.

Okay: now the experts will come in...
 
Did you expose snow as white or 18% grey? You need to open up 1-2 stops from your camera reading for snow or sand.

Looks under exposed to me unless that's what you are after.

Oh yeah, you shouldn't have to bother with PS with these. Just expose them correctly the first time.
 
Crikey, Brian, that's an effective quick fix!

Now, in Elements 2 I don't see Adjust > Colour balance. Nearest I have is Enhance > Adjust colour > Hue/Saturation, which doesn't let me work on just the midtones as you have done. Is this my problem - that I'm working on the whole blue channel rsther than just the midtones?

Cheers
Jamie
 
I think adjusting the whole band is too much.

Ever since I found the adjust color balance, that has been my preferred method. I use older versions of Photoshop, on this computer it is version 6. I wonder if a used Photoshop 5.5, 6, or 7 could be found on-the-cheap?
 
WTL,

I mainly used sunny f/16, checking this against the meter when I had the time and energy (it was minus 35 with wind chill and were were in a bit of a rush...), generally finding the meter agreed with sunny f/16 when pointed at my jacket, which I reckon is approximately 18%.

The slides look perfectly exposed to me - the sky is a nice punchy blue and the figure stands out against the background with good contrast. It's just that (I suspect because I didn't use a UV filter) it's all a bit blue!

Edit - I wonder if the scanner, however, is underexposing from my slide?

I chose not to use a UV filter, incidentally, because I didn't want another pair of air-glass interfaces; perhaps this was a mistake on my part. Does anyone do a polariser that's also a UV filter? That would be useful...

Cheers
Jamie
 
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Any PS experts gonna come in on this and tell me how to get Brian's effect in elements?

Or should I go back to using the GIMP for colour management? That at least had levels that can be set to operate on each channel...

Jamie
 
Your book should reach you in a few days - it has a whole chapter on colour adjusting. You have to switch on full colour management and adjust the eyedropper tools in levels before you can use Brians method. In elements I prefer setting a black point and if necessary a white point and adjusting midtone contrast in levels. It comes down to the same Brian does.
 
jamiewakeham said:
WTL,

I mainly used sunny f/16, checking this against the meter when I had the time and energy (it was minus 35 with wind chill and were were in a bit of a rush...), generally finding the meter agreed with sunny f/16 when pointed at my jacket, which I reckon is approximately 18%.

The slides look perfectly exposed to me - the sky is a nice punchy blue and the figure stands out against the background with good contrast. It's just that (I suspect because I didn't use a UV filter) it's all a bit blue!

Edit - I wonder if the scanner, however, is underexposing from my slide?

I chose not to use a UV filter, incidentally, because I didn't want another pair of air-glass interfaces; perhaps this was a mistake on my part. Does anyone do a polariser that's also a UV filter? That would be useful...

Cheers
Jamie
Click to expand...

You did not by accident use the T film instead of the ones for ourdoor, did you?

Fuji film tends to be a bit on the blue side but it should not be this much, from what's shown on my screen. I doubt it's the scanner but without knowing the system, hard to say. But from what you described, it sounds like the original slide is a bit on the blue side. How close are they compared to your scan?

Great to know how to fix in PS, but with slides, your goal is not to fix after shooting. Traditionally you don't crop, you don't fix, and you don't do anything after you triggered the shutter for slides. Sure you already know that.

Good luck with PS.
 
Definitely regular outdoor film. Scanner was a DualScan IV.

I think I've got my exposure ok - I believe that the scanner has slightly underexposed the slides, because of the white snow. It's not too difficult to patch that up in PS.

I think my only mistake was to ignore the effect of UV on the image, especially (as you say) when using Fuji film, which can be a bit blue anyway. And you're right - I should have got it right from the start! Someone had suggested to me that any post-1950s lens would be sufficiently UV resistant and I believed them...

I'll let you guys know when I've had another shot... with the aid of Jaap's book 🙂

Cheers
Jamie
 
Given the altitude and very blue sky, an 81 or 81a warming filter might be worth adding to your line-up. UV filters mostly cut haze, which has the effect of "fuzzing out" distant objects. The color-balance in your scene is blue-shifted, which is different from UV.
 
Well, given that you were shooting Velvia with a polarizer, I would suspect extremely saturated blue skies. In any case, this is my take on the photo...I like bluish pictures of ice and snow, so I would have left it bluer for myself, but here is a more neutral version. Basically, I opened the document, converted it to my monitor's profile, cleared the dust marks and cropped off the black borders. I created a threshold adjustment layer and moved the slider to mark the darkest and lightest points in the image. I used the color sampler tool to mark those points. I discarded the threshold layer. Then I did a curves adjustment layer and set the dark and light points to those points I had just marked. Then I boosted the bottom part of the curve a bit to bring up the shadows slightly. After that I created a levels adjustment layer and modified the red, green and blue midpoints until the white snow was more neutral. Though the sky was still ok, I wanted it a bit bluer, so I took the magic wand and selected the sky. I had to choose "grow" a few times before the sky was fully selected. Then I used the lasso tool with + and - adjustments to clean up the selection. I feathered the selection by 10 pixels. I created another levels adjustment layer and modified the blue and red midpoints to add a bit more blue and red to it (to keep it from being too cyan). Then I flattened the image, resized it to 800 pixels, used photokit sharpener to sharpen it for an 800x web image. Toned down that sharpening to 25% and then saved it for the web. It sounds like an absolute ton, but in reality it took under 5 minutes. You get used to it.

Here it is...it may look different on your screen, but it was what I liked on my screen (calibrated apple cinema display).
 
Thanks for the input, Stuart. It'll take me a while to get my head round it - I'll let you klnow how I go!

Incidentally - 100 posts at last! Took me a while...

Cheers
Jamie
 
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