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Concert. Need help with RAW : WB and Light challenge.

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RoelHendrickx

RoelHendrickx

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Who would have thought you would hear me (one of the dedicated JPG-shooters) say the following :
"Thank God I shot this concert in JPG + RAW !"

Last night I shot another rock concert in a small venue.
I posted pictures of the Headphone concert a couple of weeks ago, remember.

For Headphone, the lighting allowed for some very nice results, even in JPG.

Yesterday, with Zita Swoon, the light was EXTREMELY challenging. Basically, the stage lighting was mostly red and this remained like that throughout the whole concert, with some very rare moments of additional blue or white light. No spots on the singer, nothing, just overall redness. I shot 2 or 3 frames in JPG, and then decided that, well, this was going to be my baptism by fire for using RAW, because JPGs were going to look like s* t.

But now I am faced with a challenge that I am afraid I am not up against. How do I create a reasonable workflow for correcting the colours in RAW for dozens of shots ? Is there a way to speed this up, or is it one photo at a time ? What would be good settings to work with (rather than pushing sliders in a completely improvised way).

I could use Oly Master or PhotoShop Elements 5.

Can anyone help me ?
To give you an idea of the challenge, the first reply contains some pictures.

--
Roel Hendrickx
--
member of UK (and abroad) Photo Safari Group ( http://www.biofos.com/ukpsg )

UKPSG presents a Tunisia E-3 user field report: http://www.biofos.com/ukpsg/roel.html
 
To give a correct impression, these are JPGs straight OOC, no PP whatsoever and not cropped, just resized (except where indicated otherwise).

This partial shot of the setlist gives an idea of the red light that prevailed throughout the concert (this is a white sheet of paper !!) :



This is one of the better shots of the evening (as a JPG), because at least there is some blue in the background. All shots of the band members are bathed in red :



This is a typical wider shot :



And finally, here is about the best I think can be achieved with PP on JPG : for this PP of the same shot, I decreased red channel and increased green, but it is clumsy and cumbersome (precisely what RAW should do better, but how ?) :



If this is insufficient as illustration of the problem, let me know and I will show more.

Come on, now, all you RAW supporters, tell me how to make the best of this !

--
Roel Hendrickx
--
member of UK (and abroad) Photo Safari Group ( http://www.biofos.com/ukpsg )

UKPSG presents a Tunisia E-3 user field report: http://www.biofos.com/ukpsg/roel.html
 
This is how one of the background singers appeared almost all through the concert, in that red light :



And this is the same singer, in a very rare and brief moment with some other light :



Both are also JPGs without PP.

--
Roel Hendrickx
--
member of UK (and abroad) Photo Safari Group ( http://www.biofos.com/ukpsg )

UKPSG presents a Tunisia E-3 user field report: http://www.biofos.com/ukpsg/roel.html
 
Your software should have some ease of use method where you adjust for one shot and then select other shots and "do like this" for the rest. I don't do much batch processing - Raw Therapee (free) has a profile you can save and then apply without doing all the sliders again - I remember vaguely things like Bibble, you could get more convenient workflow.
--



Ananda
http://anandasim.spaces.live.com/
http://olympuse510.wikispaces.com/
http://picasaweb.google.com/AnandaSim/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/32554587@N00/
 
Your problems would have instantly disappear if you would have used some fill-in flash... Now it's realy hard to get some details from those shots with so much red light. I have made the same mistak once and had to discard almost every photo of the show.

--
I rather die on my feet then keep on living on my knees
http://www.myspace.com/ziggyzmund
 
uhhh! I hate these red lightning conditions. thats why I always shoot Raw (and JPG). and I'm most interested in processing solutions. but I'm afraid there will be not much to do.

for jazz musicians I often convert into b/w and it mostly works well and is adequate. but other music styles...
advanced use of a flash may useful but often not permitted.
and many musicians don't like to be "flashed".

so u have to do the best out of illumination technicians preference for red lighting.

personally I don't use master or elements so its probably useless for you:
tried (a quick) developing/pp on a similar red lighting shot of mine...
jpg out of the cam (E-3 1/80s f/6.3 ISO1250 ED50-200@96mm):



ORF converted into DNG developed in PSCS2/ACR (don't have PSCS3...)
wb auto (2850) tint 0
calibrate: green hue -100; blue hue +50
everything else by default
PSCS2 quick curves, levels adjustment



ORF developed in Raw Developer 1.7.2 (mac only)
white balance auto1
everything else by default.
batch processing is possible in Raw developer. but having used it yet.
PSCS2 quick curves, levels adjustment



--
regards
michael

sorry for bad english ;)
http://www.myfourthirds.com/user.php?id=412&page=user_folders
 
Hi Ziggyzmund,
I'm glad you, as a capable concert photographer, have caught this thread.
Did you get to see my pictures of the band "Headphone" ?
This thread (with link to gallery) :
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1022&message=28172902
ziggyzmund said:
Your problems would have instantly disappear if you would have used
some fill-in flash... Now it's realy hard to get some details from
those shots with so much red light. I have made the same mistak once
and had to discard almost every photo of the show.
Click to expand...
I know.

But I was REALLY close to the stage (these are all shot with ZD14-54 or ZD50), and I had promised long before the show started, not to use flash. In fact that was a condition for them letting me in with a "big" camera and move around in the very first rows, photographing all the time.

Any flash would surely have blinded some musicians, as I really was in their face.

--
Roel Hendrickx
--
member of UK (and abroad) Photo Safari Group ( http://www.biofos.com/ukpsg )

UKPSG presents a Tunisia E-3 user field report: http://www.biofos.com/ukpsg/roel.html
 
Thanks for your detailed and useful reply, with some ideas, examples and specific settings that I might try out.
dermicha said:
uhhh! I hate these red lightning conditions. thats why I always shoot
Raw (and JPG). and I'm most interested in processing solutions. but
I'm afraid there will be not much to do.
Click to expand...
Well, I'm hoping.
dermicha said:
for jazz musicians I often convert into b/w and it mostly works well
and is adequate. but other music styles...
Click to expand...
I had already made the plan to at least try some of the pictures also in B&W. I am just afraid that all those reds will give me lots of grey with little Black nor White, but we will see.
dermicha said:
advanced use of a flash may useful but often not permitted.
Click to expand...
As was the case in this occasion.
dermicha said:
and many musicians don't like to be "flashed".
Click to expand...
True
dermicha said:
so u have to do the best out of illumination technicians preference
for red lighting.
Click to expand...
It was basically mostly back-lighting. No real spots or highlights and no lights from up high. The show was a try-out for a festival tour, so one might hope that the actual concerts will be lit a lot better...
dermicha said:
personally I don't use master or elements so its probably useless for
you:
tried (a quick) developing/pp on a similar red lighting shot of mine...
jpg out of the cam (E-3 1/80s f/6.3 ISO1250 ED50-200@96mm):



ORF converted into DNG developed in PSCS2/ACR (don't have PSCS3...)
wb auto (2850) tint 0
calibrate: green hue -100; blue hue +50
everything else by default
PSCS2 quick curves, levels adjustment



ORF developed in Raw Developer 1.7.2 (mac only)
white balance auto1
everything else by default.
batch processing is possible in Raw developer. but having used it yet.
PSCS2 quick curves, levels adjustment



sorry for bad english ;)
Click to expand...
No worries :
1. your english is just fine

2. I much prefer useful info with an occasional language error, over eloquent but useless posts...

--
Roel Hendrickx
--
member of UK (and abroad) Photo Safari Group ( http://www.biofos.com/ukpsg )

UKPSG presents a Tunisia E-3 user field report: http://www.biofos.com/ukpsg/roel.html
 
I will be trying out all your tips and techniques later (probably not today).

Now (at my office) I don't have a RAW developer (I have not updated my PhotoShop Elements 5 to support ORF from the E-3 yet...) like I have at home.

But I decided to find out what Photoshop can do with the JPG's.

And I must say I am amazed at the results Photoshop achieves in some case, even on lowly JPGs. Probably not as good as what changing WB in RAW can achieve, but still already a big improvement.

Here are some samples.
The first pic is alway the JPG straight OOC (with all the red).

The second pic is one that I did not fiddle with myself, but on which I let Photoshop do its thing with two standard actions :
  • "automatic improvements" (translation of my Flemish statusbar)
  • "determining levels" (ditto).
The combination of both took a while (on my office computer), but I must say there are noticeable improvements here. Mind you : not for all pictures. True red remained red... I am showing some "good" examples.
Make sure to scroll down : I've kept the best for last...

orig :



was turned from red to yellowish, but better :



orig :



still reddish, but with other colours (this can be turned to B&W I think, better than the orig) :



orig :



most spectacular improvement (on auto-pilot starting from JPG) :



I wonder whether my (absent) RAW-skills will allow me to get the same amount of improvement from the RAW version of that last one...

--
Roel Hendrickx
--
member of UK (and abroad) Photo Safari Group ( http://www.biofos.com/ukpsg )

UKPSG presents a Tunisia E-3 user field report: http://www.biofos.com/ukpsg/roel.html
 
Some of these shots are amazing.

A few opinions:
  • You don't need to necessarily make the white perfectly white. After all, they used colored lights. But sometimes it is too much.
  • B/W can also make for some interesting concert shots.
And for the type of job you're doing, Adobe Lightroom (and probably other products) lets you apply the same white balance to several photos, either at once or by clicking one button.
 
You are to kind:)

I saw your thread and was realy amazed by the photos you took! They were realy good if not excelent and I was even checking every exif I could find on your slideshow to study them :). I would be realy proud of those and I hope I could shoot this kind of quality photos without flash. Sorry I didn't mention that in your post but it was already ful by soooo many replies....

It's a real pain if they restrict you not to use flash...especially if they don't have the right lightning set up. The red light realy kills all the details and can't do much except for to wait the good light to appear as you did on the last photo you posted.

One of my great red light events :)



I think that in these kind of events you realy can't do without flash and it doesn't matter what kind of camera or lens you have.
RoelHendrickx said:
ziggyzmund said:
Your problems would have instantly disappear if you would have used
some fill-in flash... Now it's realy hard to get some details from
those shots with so much red light. I have made the same mistak once
and had to discard almost every photo of the show.
Click to expand...
I know.
But I was REALLY close to the stage (these are all shot with ZD14-54
or ZD50), and I had promised long before the show started, not to use
flash. In fact that was a condition for them letting me in with a
"big" camera and move around in the very first rows, photographing
all the time.
Any flash would surely have blinded some musicians, as I really was
in their face.

--
Roel Hendrickx
--
member of UK (and abroad) Photo Safari Group
( http://www.biofos.com/ukpsg )
UKPSG presents a Tunisia E-3 user field report:
http://www.biofos.com/ukpsg/roel.html
Click to expand...
--
I rather die on my feet then keep on living on my knees
http://www.myspace.com/ziggyzmund
 
Quick attempt with the jpg you posted using lightroom. It's a small file, but there is room to pp even in jpg. Lightroom allows for batch processing.

 
Red lights. Boo! We hates them! Not so bad at back of stage but I would like to rip out every red can at the front of stage and beat the lighting tech or cheapskate venue owner over the head with them I hate them so much.

I'm not familiar with PSE-5, what version of ACR does it use? If it's ACR3.7 your job isn't so easy, but if it's ACR4.x then you have Hue/Saturation/Luminace sliders for 8 colour channels and fixing colour casts becomes so much easier.

Of course, some people have told me that it is not my job to fix colour casts, I must faithfully represent exactly the colours I saw on the night or I will offend the lighting technician. I'll let you make your own mind up about this moral dilemma.

Thinking back to my ACR 3.x days (grimace) I try to remember what I did to get results out of cr@p red lighting. As someone else suggested, B&W is the first, easy option. Some shots that appear completely unusable can be saved with the B&W treatment. Channel mixer is a good way to go.

Another approach is to play with your WB sliders to get as close as you can in ACR, then use the primary colour sliders in 'Camera Calibration' and see what you can get. One approach is simply to desaturate the red channel slightly.

This one is Temperature slider all the way to the left. Tint -56. Red channel desaturated -25



This is Temp all the way to the left. Tint -45. Red Hue +25 Green Hue -25 Blue Hue +25



This is Temp all the way to the left. Tint -60 Red Saturation -45



Of course you always can get better results working from the RAW than from web jpegs.

Just play around with the sliders and see what you can get, that's how I learned. As I said earlier, the later versions of ACR are much better with the H/S/L sliders. These were in the Lightroom 2 Beta that I played with also so if you can your hands on that...

P.S. I did see your Headphone thread, in fact had it pointed out to me. I think some John bloke was spreading nasty rumours about me being a gig photographer, wish he wouldn't do that because then I have a reputation to live up to 8) I was going to comment but in the end didn't have time, that's what life with a newborn baby is like, sometimes everything else must be put aside for your child.
 
But can you also tell me (in PP layman's terms) what you did approximately to get that result ?
And would you like me to upload a bigger resolution file to try it with ?

(Because these were intended only as illustration, I uploaded to my Zenfolio account files of 100-200 Kb, while I normally save at around 700-1000 Kb)
--
Roel Hendrickx
--
member of UK (and abroad) Photo Safari Group ( http://www.biofos.com/ukpsg )

UKPSG presents a Tunisia E-3 user field report: http://www.biofos.com/ukpsg/roel.html
 
I would do two thing.

First (using the RAW software of your choice) I would locate and image that has a point know to be gray or white, and set your white balance to that point. I noticed a couple of your shots, one with the gray rim of a drum and one with a white guitar face, that would work well with one click WB. Doing this, then applying it across all the images should get you pretty close without having to do extreme color adjustment by guesswork.

The other is to probably lower contrast on each image. Oly cameras have a tendancy to raise in contrast with the higher ISO. This can sometimes make color a trick beast to handle.

I would be happy to take a look at a file and see what I can provide in the way of help!
--
Regards, Kevin
--------------------
Member PPA, WPPI, NAPP
 
This is turning into an interesting and valuable thread.
Kurt Petersen said:
Red lights. Boo! We hates them! Not so bad at back of stage but I
would like to rip out every red can at the front of stage and beat
the lighting tech or cheapskate venue owner over the head with them I
hate them so much.
Click to expand...
Well, it was "only" a try-out concert in the warehouse-type venue of a youth club.
I guess they tried out the music, but not the nice lights...
Kurt Petersen said:
I'm not familiar with PSE-5, what version of ACR does it use? If it's
ACR3.7 your job isn't so easy, but if it's ACR4.x then you have
Hue/Saturation/Luminace sliders for 8 colour channels and fixing
colour casts becomes so much easier.
Of course, some people have told me that it is not my job to fix
colour casts, I must faithfully represent exactly the colours I saw
on the night or I will offend the lighting technician. I'll let you
make your own mind up about this moral dilemma.
Click to expand...
Well, I don't think the aim would be to represent the evening as if it was lit by sunlight... But too much is too much.
Kurt Petersen said:
Thinking back to my ACR 3.x days (grimace) I try to remember what I
did to get results out of cr@p red lighting. As someone else
suggested, B&W is the first, easy option. Some shots that appear
completely unusable can be saved with the B&W treatment. Channel
mixer is a good way to go.
Another approach is to play with your WB sliders to get as close as
you can in ACR, then use the primary colour sliders in 'Camera
Calibration' and see what you can get. One approach is simply to
desaturate the red channel slightly.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the tips. I will be doing quite some experimenting, I guess.

In order to limit the amount of work, I will first make a rigid selection (throw out everything OOF etc). Although indeed, maybe one of the all-reds could make a nice B&W...
Kurt Petersen said:
This one is Temperature slider all the way to the left. Tint -56. Red
channel desaturated -25



This is Temp all the way to the left. Tint -45. Red Hue +25 Green Hue
-25 Blue Hue +25



This is Temp all the way to the left. Tint -60 Red Saturation -45

Click to expand...
Thanks for the examples.
Kurt Petersen said:
Of course you always can get better results working from the RAW than
from web jpegs.
Click to expand...
Obviously. Want me to forward you some ?
Kurt Petersen said:
Just play around with the sliders and see what you can get, that's
how I learned. As I said earlier, the later versions of ACR are much
better with the H/S/L sliders. These were in the Lightroom 2 Beta
that I played with also so if you can your hands on that...
Click to expand...
I don't even know my way around the programs I already have, but I'll look...
Kurt Petersen said:
P.S. I did see your Headphone thread, in fact had it pointed out to
me. I think some John bloke was spreading nasty rumours about me
being a gig photographer, wish he wouldn't do that because then I
have a reputation to live up to 8)
Click to expand...
I hope I don't get any reputation at all...
Kurt Petersen said:
I was going to comment but in the end didn't have time,
that's what life with a newborn baby is like,
sometimes everything else must be put aside for your child.
Click to expand...
Absolutely and most definitely true.
This is by far the greatest truth in this thread so far.

Take care and thanks again.
--
Roel Hendrickx
--
member of UK (and abroad) Photo Safari Group ( http://www.biofos.com/ukpsg )

UKPSG presents a Tunisia E-3 user field report: http://www.biofos.com/ukpsg/roel.html
 
mpeman said:
I would do two thing.

First (using the RAW software of your choice) I would locate and
image that has a point know to be gray or white, and set your white
balance to that point. I noticed a couple of your shots, one with
the gray rim of a drum and one with a white guitar face, that would
work well with one click WB. Doing this, then applying it across all
the images should get you pretty close without having to do extreme
color adjustment by guesswork.
Click to expand...
There are also some shots with the singer's shoes. He was wearing white boots. Really white ones. The guitar face was more shiny, like whitish mother-of-pearl.

And I have the shot with the setlist on white paper, but this is maybe too extreme...
hurtsme said:
The other is to probably lower contrast on each image. Oly cameras
have a tendancy to raise in contrast with the higher ISO. This can
sometimes make color a trick beast to handle.
Click to expand...
OK, I don't get this exactly, but will try to see what you mean.
hurtsme said:
I would be happy to take a look at a file and see what I can provide
in the way of help!
Click to expand...
OK. I will look if you have your e-mail in your profile and send you an ORF-file.
I will look for an overall shot with those white shoes.

BTW : my own e-mail is not listed in my profile (it is my office mail that I must try to keep as pristine as possible and not have it spread too much).

Thanks in advance.
hurtsme said:
--
Regards, Kevin
--------------------
Member PPA, WPPI, NAPP
Click to expand...
--
Roel Hendrickx
--
member of UK (and abroad) Photo Safari Group ( http://www.biofos.com/ukpsg )

UKPSG presents a Tunisia E-3 user field report: http://www.biofos.com/ukpsg/roel.html
 
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