Tungsten yellow cast on slide film

[telenous]

I have just received with the morning post a slide film (Fuji Provia 400) I used for some casual snapshots with friends and family. The interior shots suffer from the familiar yellow tungsten cast and I 'd like to photoshop them away. I experimented a bit in the past with variable results - does anyone from the cognoscenti here have some suggestion for a good way to strip the yellow cast?

Many thanks in advance 🙂

 

[Pherdinand]

Try to do it with the curves adjustment in the scanning stage, not in post-processing.
To me it seemed to be easier.
However, you might never get back the normal colours anymore. It just might not have enough blue/cyan "data" recorded, on the slide itself.

 

[kully]

telenous - I had exactly the same problem with the same film this summer.

I was messing around on Friday with Photoshop and managed to get some good results with using the photo filter '80' (I think).

I'll check tonight to make sure.

 

[CJP6008]

You will need an 80A (giving a mired shift of -131) to go from 3200K tungsten to 5500K daylight. This will cost you 2 stops. Alternatively, if working under tungsten shoot on Kodak EPJ or EPT, both tungsten balanced films. An 85B will be needed to shoot tungsten film in daylight (mired shift +131).

Hope this helps.

 

[kully]

Ah, 80A ¬ 80, listen to CJP - he speaks the truth.

 

[dmr]

I have just received with the morning post a slide film (Fuji Provia 400) I used for some casual snapshots with friends and family. The interior shots suffer from the familiar yellow tungsten cast and I 'd like to photoshop them away. I experimented a bit in the past with variable results - does anyone from the cognoscenti here have some suggestion for a good way to strip the yellow cast?

Different film here, but similar problem. About a year ago I tried some Walgreens/Agfa 400 for some urban twilight scenes which were lit mainly by incandescent light. (See example below.) I have been used to the "forgiving" nature of the various Kodak and Fuji films, in that they seem to be quite tolerant of various artificial light sources, and I was disappointed with the W/A photos and tried to correct with curves, levels, etc. with Photoshop. A couple of the people here tried too, but none of the results really looked like what I remember the scene to be.

Anyway, looking at the histograms (see capture below) it turns out that the blue layer is quite underexposed, and trying to correct for it results in very bizarre effects, such as an electric blue twilight sky.

I can see how this is similar to what you got with the slide film, which in general is less forgiving than print film.

I have found that the Fuji negative films are very good in available light and mixed light. They tell me (the ubiquitous "they") that this "4th color layer" is responsible for this.

 

[Pherdinand]

If you use a blue filter (the 80A) to correct for the tungsten, when you expose your film, you will notice that you lose 3 stops of light or more. This practically means, the 80A filter lets all the blue channel through and has to cut alot of the red and green (if you think in terms of RGB which is not fully correct but maybe for scanning it is) to properly have it balanced.
This means, if you do NOT use the blue filter, the exposure conditions will be determined mostly by the red/green components and the very weak blue light will hardly have an effect on the film. So it is indeed practically "underexposing" the blue layer.
And it is difficult to save a severely underexposed image by postprocessing. You basically have to digitally amplify the blue channel to get it up to the level of the rest.

Edit: here's an example on Fuji NPH that i tried to de-tungstenize a bit.

 

[dmr]

the exposure conditions will be determined mostly by the red/green components and the very weak blue light will hardly have an effect on the film. So it is indeed practically "underexposing" the blue layer.

Yesbut 🙂 ... And here's something I don't totally understand ... The Fuji (negative) films consistently give pleasant and normal-looking colors when shot under incandescent or mixed light. I'm attaching an example, very similar circumstances to the previous one and actually only a couple blocks away, where the interior and the awning lights look far more natural than the ones shot on W/A. Histogram on this one shows more or less normal on the blue channel, unlike the previous one.

I can remember WAYYYY back 40 years ago, not to show my true age, when a druggist told me to use CLEAR flash instead of blue with the new Kodacolor. I knew my dad always used blue flash with Kodacolor previously. As I got into 35mm, I could consistently get realistic color shooting things like Kodacolor-X under indoor incandescent light (if it was bright enough for me to hand-hold, that is). 🙂

 

[telenous]

Thanks to everyone for great advice. I will check with Robert White for the K15 (80A) filter - although losing three stops somehow defeats the purpose when shooting indoors.

Pherdi and DMR, the two corrected shots you posted look like what I wish to get out of my yellow cast ones. I will play with PS tonight to see what I can do.

 

[dmr]

Pherdi and DMR, the two corrected shots you posted look like what I wish to get out of my yellow cast ones. I will play with PS tonight to see what I can do.

The last one I posted was not corrected. That's the way it looked on a Walgreens lab scan. Fuji negative films seem to be very tolerant of artificial light.

 

[telenous]

The last one I posted was not corrected. That's the way it looked on a Walgreens lab scan. Fuji negative films seem to be very tolerant of artificial light.

Ooops! Sorry. I read your post earlier today, but then somehow confused it with what Pherdinand was saying. 😱

I think my Provia slides are actually affected more than your photo - but then, the ones that are, were taken indoors with light which I knew would throw some cast.

Playing with the curves before scanning does help a little bit but I wonder if there is any photoshop trick to further rectify them.

 

[CJP6008]

At the end of the day folks if you are shooting a scene where the lighting is mixed with wildly varying colour temperatures something has to give. Correct one and the other looks odd and so forth. Generally, one has to decide which is the key lighting and work on getting that right. However, for those with plenty of time on their hands or a very special shot to work on, one could, to take the example of dmr's shot, select the sky colour and "park it" so to speak, making the adjustments to the rest of the scene leaving the sky untouched. This can be done in Photoshop.

 

[rogue_designer]

If you must try to save a shot in post processing - you can sometimes add a blue blending layer over your image to feed the values back into your image. With various opacity modes and values, you can sometimes get close.

It's a jury-rigged last ditch effort tho. No substitute for using a different film, or filtering in situ.

 

[Pherdinand]

As CJP says. You can't optimize everything and also get a noisefree image. Nor can you use strong colour filters at exposure and retain all the light you have.
Except if you use black and white, of course😀

dmr, the last shout you posted: Look in the things inside the house. They are all orange. Of course the overall tone of the image is good, because there are things outside illuminated by early evening light and/or street lamps that might be higher in col temperature. But the strictly tungsten-illuminated parts are quite orange, i'd say.