Excercise: Managing colour

For this exercise, I needed to find two or three images that have what I judge to be a significant colour cast, as the main purpose to the exercise is to 'correct' it. For most photography all that is important is that the overall colour looks reasonable and expected. I need to make sure that at least one image contains a surface that is 'known' (that is expected) to be grey. Among such surfaces are concrete, steel, aluminium, car tyres, asphalt, thick clouds (should be easy) and shadows on white.

Using Lightroom I am to examine the image and make a judgement on the colour cast.

I will shoot the images in raw - because shooting in raw keeps setting separate from image capture, any raw converter software valuably allows direct access to the white balance and hue settings. The first useful choice is the list of already-worked out white balance settings, which should more or less match the descriptions on the camera's menu, alternatively, or as an additional way of refining the effect, adjust the white balance slider and the hue slider (the latter is between red and green and so works on a different axis to the bluish-yellowish scale of the white balance.

This image was taken in raw, ISO 100, 55mm(!),  aperture priority f/5.6, 1/250
First I changed the white balance using the drop down box, I always love the way it changes the image so significantly and is great fun. Initially the closed choice was Tungsten, making the spider look ok if a little dark but the hand was tinted blue (no surprise really with tungsten but I thought I'd give it a go), of the selection, it turned out that auto looked best, taking the orange tint off. I thought I'd try the other suggestion in the notes of the white balance slider using both the temp and the tint to remove the orange tint and produce a much more natural image:

looks completely different!

This image was shot as a JPEG so I didn't have the luxury of having the white balance sections, instead I reduced exposure, there are still small areas of highlight clipping where the sun is catching Kylie's hair but these are acceptable for me. I then reduced the colour saturation by -20 which made quite a difference:

ISO200, 18mm, f/4.5, 1/40
This image, although has a lot of yellow in the image, does seem to have a yellow colour cast which can be seen especially on Danny's face. As the image was shot in raw I was able to play with the white balance settings, but again preferred to use the white balance sliders focussing primarily on the temperature slider which dealt with the yellow colour cast and also moved the tint slider by a fraction (-3):

The image seems to appear clearer