Fairie Festival 2007
All of my Fairie Festival photos came out with awful color this year. They all had an extreme blue cast. Even when I supposedly fixed the color cast (to shift the blue), the color balance was just awful in a different way. It was still wildly unnatural. Every tone I tried to adjust changed others, or - when done for each color individually - just the change in that shade, when in context with all of the other shades, didn't look right. Frustrating.
I'm supposing that the bad color is a result of my camera's white balance being off. The full auto setting of my Canon 400D would automatically adjust the white balance for the bright sunlight/clear blue sky and high brightness/shadow contrast. But the full auto setting only has the sharpness/resolution set at a little above 50% and that cannot be changed in full auto - it's unchangeable. I want my detail to be as high as possible, so I use the "P" setting. I'm still learning about my XTi, though from what I can gather so far, you can't put the white balance on auto balance when using the "P" setting. Frustrating.
Anyway, using Photoshop Elements 5, I've tried a number of ways to make the color corrections, including adjusting based on "skin tones" (which gets the closest of any methods so far), auto color correction (doesn't help much), auto anything, and lots of manual manipulations available in various menu items - including adjusting levels by histogram, especially blue/yellow. Nothing works across the board. It's gonna take a looooong time to fix these. And on a few, the color is unfixable. I may be able to salvage them by making them B&W or a creative color combination not intended to look natural. It's a salvage operation. Frustrating.
See more images from years of fairie festivals in my Fairie Festival Set.
Fairie Festival 2007
All of my Fairie Festival photos came out with awful color this year. They all had an extreme blue cast. Even when I supposedly fixed the color cast (to shift the blue), the color balance was just awful in a different way. It was still wildly unnatural. Every tone I tried to adjust changed others, or - when done for each color individually - just the change in that shade, when in context with all of the other shades, didn't look right. Frustrating.
I'm supposing that the bad color is a result of my camera's white balance being off. The full auto setting of my Canon 400D would automatically adjust the white balance for the bright sunlight/clear blue sky and high brightness/shadow contrast. But the full auto setting only has the sharpness/resolution set at a little above 50% and that cannot be changed in full auto - it's unchangeable. I want my detail to be as high as possible, so I use the "P" setting. I'm still learning about my XTi, though from what I can gather so far, you can't put the white balance on auto balance when using the "P" setting. Frustrating.
Anyway, using Photoshop Elements 5, I've tried a number of ways to make the color corrections, including adjusting based on "skin tones" (which gets the closest of any methods so far), auto color correction (doesn't help much), auto anything, and lots of manual manipulations available in various menu items - including adjusting levels by histogram, especially blue/yellow. Nothing works across the board. It's gonna take a looooong time to fix these. And on a few, the color is unfixable. I may be able to salvage them by making them B&W or a creative color combination not intended to look natural. It's a salvage operation. Frustrating.
See more images from years of fairie festivals in my Fairie Festival Set.