Colour cast on faces from clothes

[Shibang]

Hi All,

Can anybody advice here?

I had some friends running the Amsterdam marathon and half marathon and managed to spot them and got a few shots.

As with most runners these days they like to dress in the brightest colours and all my shots has a bright colour cast on their faces.

Does anybody have any suggestions about how I could remove this.

This is a cropped image so you can see the colour better on his face.

I normally only use Lightroom 4 although I got Elements 11 cheap not long ago but had much time to learn how to use it.

Thanks and regards,

Gary

[Colin Southern]

If there is a quick and easy way, I can't think of it, unfortunately.

[Stagecoach]

Gary,

I downloaded to Elements and opened Hue/Saturation, selected yellow and reduced the Hue.

I'm certain it is not the correct technical method to use because Colin would have known it but it's a work around that certainly 'improves' things, so select just the head and give it a go.

Grahame

[PhotomanJohn]

Gary,

I agree with Grahame. I fooled around with the image in Photoshop with a HSL layer adjusted to turn the yellow skin into more natural looking skin and applied it selectively using the layer mask with a low (20%) opacity soft brush and it looks pretty good even zoomed in. I assume you could do something similar in Elements.

John

[Colin Southern]

Gary,

I downloaded to Elements and opened Hue/Saturation, selected yellow and reduced the Hue.

I'm certain it is not the correct technical method to use because Colin would have known it but it's a work around that certainly 'improves' things, so select just the head and give it a go.

Grahame

I Had a play with that, but the big problem is there's a fair chunk of yellow in skin tones - and even if one removes the yellow there, it still needs to be changed. I tried the healing brush set to colour, but it wasn't consistent enough.

It just struck me as one of those things where doing it and doing it well were probably going to be different things.

[revi]

I can understand you 'd prefer removing the yellow cast, but is it really such a problem, as long as the yellow shirt is in the image:
the viewer (if he even sees the cast on parts of the face) also realises where it comes from, i.e. the face is expected to have a
yellow reflection on some parts

[dubaiphil]

B&w?!?!?!

[TerryScuba]

Hi Gary,

I do a lot of underwater photography and have a similar problem, mine is a cyan cast in the shadows. The way I rectify it is to use a product called Color Mechanic Pro from Digital Light & Color. This is a Photoshop filter and sometimes I can get away with applying it to the whole image, otherwise i use area selections.

Hope this helps,

Terry

[Shibang]

Thanks all for the good advise.

I'll have a look when I'm home tonight and see how things look in Elements and if I'm not happy with the results then I'll just have to live with it.

Next time I'll ask them to wear darker colours

Regards,

Gary

[PhotomanJohn]

As Colin said you can't just remove the yellow. Magenta and other colors need to be added. My approach was to create a HSL layer and then adjust the sliders until the yellow portions of the face had a natural but slightly darker skin color ignoring the rest of the of the photo. One can come close enough just using the sliders in the master mode. Then I added a layer mask filled with black and then slowly revealed the effect of the HSL layer in the yellow areas of the face, neck and arm, more so in the darker areas and less in the lighter areas. I then applied the same technique to the teeth. When I was done the photo looked very natural even when zoomed in.

John

[Ken MT]

Opened in Elements 9, used magic wand on relevant areas of face at 20 contiguous, duplicated layer, Enhance colour, adjusted hue and saturation on yellow channel -22 for starters.

[Colin Southern]

Opened in Elements 9, used magic wand on relevant areas of face at 20 contiguous, duplicated layer, Enhance colour, adjusted hue and saturation on yellow channel -22 for starters.

Looks pretty darn good to me!

[davidedric]

Or a five minute fix with Nik Viveza (just to illustrate), using the hue slider

[rpcrowe]

I often have this problem when I photograph white Maltese dogs on bright material.

I open the photo. I make a new layer by clicking on the second icon from the right in the bottom right hand panel.

I then reverse foreground background on the left tools column by clicking on the double headed arrow above it. If you get a box asking for the new color just pick white.

Pick an appropriate size brush from the brush tool, make the opacity low, start with around 21%. Brush over the stained areas. You can go over areas that need a little more. Or you could increase the opacity.

Then you can save the picture as a jpeg, or as a Photoshop image which will preserve the layer.

Lately, I have been experimenting with my NIK Software (Viveza 2).