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Sickly red live concert photos


J

Josiah

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Hey...I shoot live concerts from time to time, and one of the issues afterward is the way red lights make a guy look awful.

You can't use a flash at a lot of pro concerts, it's a no-no, so I use Nifty-Fifty lens.

Anyone have anything to say about getting the red outta this guy's face while maintaining the integrity of the shot(s)?

Thanks...!

Glenn Tilbrook .JPG
 
Josiah said:
Hey...I shoot live concerts from time to time, and one of the issues afterward is the way red lights make a guy look awful.

You can't use a flash at a lot of pro concerts, it's a no-no, so I use Nifty-Fifty lens.

Anyone have anything to say about getting the red outta this guy's face while maintaining the integrity of the shot(s)?

Thanks...!

View attachment 38060
Click to expand...

Not sure if you can get all the Red out. But you could use a couple layer adjustments to tone it down. I would play with the color balance and hue and saturation adjustment layers to start with. Once you have the skin tone where you would like it you can play with the masks that are attached to the layer adjustments. That way only the skin tones are effected.
 
My approach would be to add a black and white adjustment layer set the layer blending mode to luminosity and tweak the red sliders to remove it.

Alternatively you can use a selective color adjustment layer this will probably give you far better results but a bit trickier to get use to.

1.PNG

I think it is good to have some cast of light on the subject because it creates and shows the atmosphere better with a better representation of what is going on.

I should also add it takes more than just 1 quick fix to get the results your after you may have to combine different methods, but if you do it with no light cast at all then it will probably ruin the photo

you may also want to do it with the camera raw filter and if you shoot raw it will give you far greater flexibility.

or you may just go for the simple solution and add a vibrance adjustment layer and reduce vibrance way down
22.PNG
 
Last edited:
The previous replies have given some nice techniques to reduce the problem after it has occurred. However, the best approach is to understand what caused it and how to avoid it in the future.

I can say with 100% certainty that at some point in the life of this image, one or more of the color channels was "blown". This is common photographic jargon for one of the RGB channels being maxed out, for example, (256, G, B), (R, G, 256), or even two channels (256, G, 256) maxed out. This imparts the characteristic look that you see in this photo. It is extremely common in concert and flower pix, especially those with dark backgrounds.

The solution is simple: decrease the exposure until this doesn't happen. You shot this using a Nikon d300, a very capable camera. Just set the rear display to show the histogram of each of the 3 channels separately, and then adjust the exposure compensation until you don't see a big spike at the RH edge of any of the 3 histograms.

To do this, you might have to decrease the exposure by 1 or 2 stops. This may seem like a lot, but (a) you can recover much of this in post-processing, and (b) it's vastly preferable to have no important blown pixels but slightly increased shadow noise, versus the opposite.

HTH,

Tom M
 
Three layers, second layer i played around with the colour balance settings, then on a new layer i made a high pass copy just to give some contrast to the sharpening really, applied the layers as soft light and then brushed away some of the dark blues on a mask layer to reveal deeper blues and blues around the jacket area also.
The pinkish red lights are there obviously from the stage lighting, just really saturated on original image.

masklayer.jpg
 
Thanks, everyone. I haven't had time to get back to these shots or this forum to implement some of your suggestions, but it's nice to return and see so many people offering help. I'll get on it!

And I shall pass it on to someone else needing assistance when I can...

Thanks again. JOSIAH
 
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