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Reduce over exposure and yellow tint - night photo


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Hello everyone,

this is my first post and I need your help to solve a matter. I bought Affinity 7 months ago and I'm still learning and discovering all its awesome functions and tools.

I like taking pictures in the evening or in the night but sometimes the subject is overexposed and yellow  (yellow tint caused by public lighting). How can I solve this problem? For example, in the enclosed picture, I would like to reduce over exposure of the buildings on the island and also reduce yellow caused by lights without changing the rest of the landscape .

Any suggestion on how to proceed?

I've tried HDR and many others regulations (curves, HSL, masks) with quite good results but not so satisfying

This picture was taken with Canon EOS100D+Sigma 17-50.

F/7.1 - 20" - ISO400 - 35mm

Thanks in advance for your feedback and sorry for my bad english

Annalisa

IMG_4882_A.JPG

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You could use the White Balance Adjustment filter and use the picker to mark an area of the yellow such as
784791036_ScreenShot2018-07-10at20_54_50.png.b86f6b3342fa3f3b64f0b99c065a8893.png

This is the white arrow example
2021938308_ScreenShot2018-07-10at20_58_47.png.887f939ed9c5b989b705a62774857bb5.png

 

This is the black arrow example
67400429_ScreenShot2018-07-10at20_59_11.png.cb67086b8d50bb6d51ca2eb47511a883.png

 

The highlights look blown out and will likely not have any detail in them so will be tough to fix if at all

 

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For future reference, it might be a good idea to bracket the exposures and then create a stack in Affinity Photo, sounds complicated but its simple when you've done it once. Generally you can get better recovery from an under-exposed image than an over-exposed one. One of the tricks to night time shooting is to actually take images at Twilight, or Dusk for a more night time feel, you can tweak the image to get a better night time look but still have good detail in building etc, the lighting will also look more natural.

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Don't give up too fast on the overexposed areas though. It's quite remarkable what the Shadow/Highlights filter can achieve when you play around with the settings a bit:

night_highlights.thumb.JPG.0ca37927f49796d4cec31ad6e5349482.JPG

As you can see, the highlights treatment also makes some JPEG compression artifacts quite noticeable, but maybe your original image has a better quality than the uploaded (and maybe additionally compressed by the forum software?) version. Bonus tip: Just in case you happen to have this as a RAW file, it would probably be even less of a problem since you could recover the highlights with actual sensor data in the Development Persona.

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Something else to consider is that different types of artificial lighting have different color spectra so an adjustment that works well for objects lit by one type of light won't necessarily work well for ones lit by another type. You can see this in the original screenshot where some of the shoreline areas & two places in the foreground island appear slightly greenish or bluish.

To control this you can apply an adjustment to shift the yellows towards white, paint on the mask built into that adjustment layer to remove it from the areas where it is not needed, & if necessary repeat that with a different adjustment masked to affect only the areas where it is needed.

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I actually like the colors as is--at least if that is what represents what the eye saw.

In any case, you can concentrate on the saturation of the foreground yellow. What I did below is to duplicate the image, convert the duplicate to grayscale and then invert it. Then taking the eraser and removing the black from most of the image except down front. And set a blend to Saturation (or color, cannot remember but they will be the same for this anyway) and the opacity to 60% or something. Changing the top layer's opacity will remove or add back color depending on the opacity level.

capture-001974.png.ade3bd9320a316265125c797c672b11a.png

I've attached the file.

Mike

IMG_4882_A.afphoto

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Here's another take on it:

1) Select the Yellows to change the White Balance on them only. Do this by first selecting the Blues (Select > Color Range > Select Blues) and then inverting the Selection, since yellow is opposite blue on the Color Wheel.

2) With the selection active, add a White Balance adjustment layer. Move the slider to the left, to make the previously yellow areas bluer in hue, while leaving the rest of the photo alone.

3) Go back and select the Background image layer. Create a Luminosity Selection by holding down Command (Cntrl on Windows) and Shift, and clicking on the Layer thumbnail. Or do this with a macro (lookup Luminosity Masks in the Resources section, which is available through the forum).

4) With the Luminosity selection active, create another adjustment layer, using Brightness and Contrast. Turn the Brightness down (and, perhaps, make a change in contrast if needed).

All of this lets you change the color of the yellows, and diminish the intensity of the most luminous areas of the photo.

1693295512_FixYellowCast.thumb.jpg.2529602d400ac05629edc319e4e60c57.jpg

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11 hours ago, kaffeeundsalz said:

Don't give up too fast on the overexposed areas though. It's quite remarkable what the Shadow/Highlights filter can achieve when you play around with the settings a bit:

night_highlights.thumb.JPG.0ca37927f49796d4cec31ad6e5349482.JPG

As you can see, the highlights treatment also makes some JPEG compression artifacts quite noticeable, but maybe your original image has a better quality than the uploaded (and maybe additionally compressed by the forum software?) version. Bonus tip: Just in case you happen to have this as a RAW file, it would probably be even less of a problem since you could recover the highlights with actual sensor data in the Development Persona.

That's quite impressive @kaffeeundsalz considering it looked so washed out, I'll not be so quick to condemn a washed out image in future, but I think many of these type of issues can be corrected at source when the photo is first taken, unfortunately that only happens with experience. You can tell anyone the secret to good photography, applying it to the scene is quite another thing. The biggest tip I can give anyone is to plan a shot, think ahead oh! and get an awesome app called PhotoPills I love this app its such an asset, especially for tricky shots like these.

Like Mike, I actually like the amber colour of the lights, it gives a warmth to the image, it suggests a warm summer night... You're going to tell me it's in Norway now aren't you B|

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On 7/11/2018 at 9:52 AM, firstdefence said:

You're going to tell me it's in Norway now aren't you B|

This place is in Italy, Lago d'Orta. Not so far from where I live. :)

I've tried some adjustments starting from raw file. I also made HDR after convert raw into jpeg

This is the result (compressed to be uploaded)

Many thanks for your support.

Annalisa

IMG_4882_2.jpg

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14 hours ago, Annalisa Piona said:

This place is in Italy, Lago d'Orta. Not so far from where I live. :)

I've tried some adjustments starting from raw file. I also made HDR after convert raw into jpeg

This is the result (compressed to be uploaded)

Many thanks for your support.

Annalisa

IMG_4882_2.jpg

That's better, Always wanted to visit Italy

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On 7/13/2018 at 9:19 AM, henryg said:

Please post the workflow you ended up using.

I started from raw file reducing the exposure only on the island. Then I developed the picture and worked on jpeg file.

I adjusted again exposure, yellow on HSL and white balance.  Then I switch to HDR and made others changes until the photo took a nice look for me.

Sorry but I didn't take note of the entire workflow. And I'm note sure of the right translation from italian to english of the various settings/effects of Affinity.

I made various attempts until the photo looked good.

Lately I fall in love with HDR. For almost every picture I used this function (as I discovered that it's possible to made HDR also with only one image)

Thanks again for your help and your support.

Annalisa

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