Color Balance, lets talk about it.

[terrycm]

I am curious what you guys do when you have a strong mix of daylight and artificial or interior light. Do you color balance for the interior, the exterior or try to find some happy kelvin in between? I ask because I am never happy with how blue the daylight gets when you color balance for the interior. Case in point http://www.regal360.com/clients/hearst2/index.html . I ended up having to blend the daylight exposure with the color balanced interior to achieve this shot. What do you think, and more importantly what do you guys and gals do?
-Terry

[VitoDiVita]

Yikes, I was about to ask you on the subject!

What I typically do is find the right kelvin in the interior, I color pick around, and lets say the color picker suggests 5000k, I'll usually make it a tad warmer since most programs like DXO/LR are very conservative and tend to go on the cooler side. What kills me is when the blue light from the outside reflects on the stuff thats on the inside, as seen in the pano you just posted. I had to deal with this a few months ago in this http://360revo.com/nwmetalcraft/ In extreme situations I'll try photoshopping, and do some blending, but just like you said, I can never be satisfied with the color balance.

[Bruce Hemming]

Tricky one because it is so subjective. What I have done in the past is to make a duplicate layer, pick the colour which needs subduing and decrease the saturation. Add a layer mask and then with a soft brush and reduced layer opacity just take enough of the offending colour out to arrive at a compromise that looks OK. It's a bit crude, but if you use a soft enough brush and go carefully at the right opacity you can get a decent balance that feels natural enough.

Terry, I think that you have done a fine job with that - I might have been tempted just to knock the blue back a bit in the reflection on the alterpiece (or whatever it is) but there is blue in the painting so maybe that wouldn't work.

[Morten]

Terry, I can only say that the image in question (as usual) is quite amazing. I see your point regarding trying to get good white balance throughout the image but would say it is of little consequence in this particular example. The HDR work is really good. Could you tell us what you use?

I mostly have problems shooting in rooms with big windows during the day (ocean views etc). I usually pick a happy medium between exterior and interior. I will certainly give some of the suggestions here a try. Otherwise, the only reasonable alternative is to shoot at twilight.

VitoDiVita, did you take 43 Panoramas in one store? I can’t believe how many images you have there! I am also really impressed with your HDR results. Could you also tell us a bit about your workflow and software? Image 26 (I think) has a massive dynamic range yet looks very believable.

Thanks,

Morten

[VitoDiVita]

Thanks for the compliments Morten,

Yeah there was an unbelievable amount of panoramas at that store. They wanted to cover as much as possible, so I did as they asked. I wish I had more time so I could have done a better job of stitching, but time & budget did not allow it.

I used the 5D 2 w/ the 15mm, this was my first tour with the Promote Control. Post was basically DXO(rendering took forever!)->PTGUI->Photomatix->Blended/Touch-Up in PS->FFC

[Morten]

Cheers,

I always found Photomatix inconsistent. Perhaps it's time to give it another look. Yes, that must have taken some serious work. 40+ panos, HDR!!?? Phew, I'm exhausted just thinking about it.

Morten

[VitoDiVita]

Heh yes it was exhausting. Well Terry had some tips a while back where you would mix an exposure fusion from PTGUI with a HDR file from Photomatix, it then gives the file a crisp look while not going totally over the top with the HDR. I still use that method. Oh, and I also gave the Topaz plugins a try for PS 5, it gives the image a nice punch, so I'd first mix exposure fusion/HDR, then duplicate the layer, and use Topaz and blend the Topaz image at about 40-50%.

[terrycm]

All good suggestions, I am glad I could spark a discussion on the topic. I do mix the photomatix layer with other layers because the photomatix layer always comes in "very surreal" IMO. It takes extra time to process other layers but I find this provides an opportunity to create your own look and style. Over the years my own panos have taking a turn for the better (I hope). I use to use photomatix very heavily in the beginning because I was caught up in that heavy HDR look. Over time I have scaled back a bit and I am trying to find that edge between being visually believable and surreal. It takes time like anything and there are many others here and elsewhere who have a look and feel I greatly admire. Bruce is one of them, Ton, and Adolfo just to name a few from the ffc family.

I am always looking for different techniques so I appreciate you guys sharing your methods here. I would love to get some others involved and keep this conversation going.

-Terry

[kbellis]

Bruce, I'd never use the word crude in talking about your excellent control over any aspect of your images. And I agree with you that it is largely subjective and partly dependent on the mood you feel and the mood you want to communicate. Ton's example around Christmas was excellent in illustrating the battle of competing temperatures! Terry, your struggle is subtler and seems perfectly believable... but I did pause to wonder if those were really salmon colored lamps straddling the fireplace

The concept centered in much of the NIK line up of software and HDR FX Pro in particular, that of being able to target specific areas is very attractive although potentially disastrous approaching the seems/ margins of an equirectangular. They're up to v1.2 and maybe it's time to revisit this with more experiments addressing competing colored lights.

The other amazing player emerging is PhotoEngine made by Oloneo. Their ReLight feature has great potential and I've yet to fully explore it. I've only done one set of very limited experiments. Unfortunately, the scenario of lighting a subject, photographing it, then relighting it some other way, photographing it, and so on doesn't lend itself easily to panoramas as other subjects of narrower field of view. Skipping over the ReLight feature, the HDR processing offered by PhotoEngine is worth looking at. I've just posted the results of my Oloneo PhotoEngine Benchmark Tests and on my fledgling website if anybody is interested.

If you guys are interested in test driving the current beta of PhotoEngine you're encouraged to download it now while it’s free - even if you're a Mac user. You'll be offered a substantial discount for registered beta testers when it becomes available and a Mac version is planned once they're out of beta. Visit oloneo.com for more information on this incredible piece of software engineering and for forum discussions, please visit the PhotoEngine group on Flickr.

Regardless of the tool in your hand, color balancing is largely feeling, your eye and practice... something that I know I have much practicing to do.

Kind regards,

Kelly

[Bruce Hemming]

- you are all very kind. I would still describe the technique as crude because it's a bit brute force, the Oloneo approach does look interesting, but unfortunately will have to wait until they release a Mac version for me to get to play. I have heard that there is an issue with the fact that to bracket in Oloneo you have to change aperture not shutter speed - can anyone add user experience to that?

I'm fairly certain that most of you will be familiar with Christian Bloch's excellent and essential work The HDRI Handbook. One of his comments re the use of HDRI lighting probes is that they are only the beginning of the process. He is adamant that good and believable results need post production and I think that is the lesson that we have to take into our panoramas. I read comments on a lot of the other forums where beginners are expecting polished finished results from a single piece of software and are consequently disappointed when their results fail to live up to their expectations. We don't have ambient occlusion and its variants which the 3D artist has at his control to give the "beauty pass" to an image, but we do have Photoshop, and it was only when I really began to study that software that I became more confident in my ability to deal with these kind of scenarios.

As an aside, when I first started as a second assistant back in the early 70's we used to send film to different labs depending on what colour shift we wanted - it wasn't until E6 came on the scene that there was truly reliable repeatable results - at least we have more control these days.

regards

Bruce

[kbellis]

Hi Bruce,

I'm not sure I understand... either what you heard or what you mean... however, I've never changed apertures when shooting, only shutter speeds, and PhotoEngine allows you the ability to mess with EVs anyway:

bracketed.JPG (25.84 KiB) Viewed 1004 times

This is an "as is" screen shot having simply added three bracketed-like-normal images.

Bracketed-EV.JPG (21.75 KiB) Viewed 1004 times

This a "before frigging with EVs" screen shot

bracket-frig.JPG (22.52 KiB) Viewed 1004 times

This an "after frigging with EVs" screen shot - notice I lied to PhotoEngine?

The other thing for Mac users, have you looked into something like this? I don't know anything about Mac world, but it seems like the 2 worlds are always getting closer...

[Bruce Hemming]

Interestingly this has also come up on the PanoToolsNG group and as ever Blochi has a pertinent comment

"yeah, it's really neat. I just did a test series on ghost reduction, and Oloneo came out surprisingly close to Photoshop CS5. I tried the relighting, and it's stunning at first, but sort of non-tolreable that it only accepts single exposures. This should really be happening with HDRs - even their example source images are clipped on the actual light source. Turns out, you can also rebuild this sort of effect in Photoshop by isolating individual light contributions with Difference and Exclusion blending modes."

There is an extended thread on Oloneo on the HDR Labs forum http://www.hdrlabs.com/cgi-bin/forum/Ya ... 1279177279

Regards

Bruce

[terrycm]

My latest efforts in mastering color balance. Thanks in part to the helpful tips from Bruce.









....

[VitoDiVita]

The above equi is what my typical pano looks like color-balance wise, and then the bottom one is a more realistic rendition. I can imagine there was some serious masking in this one?

[terrycm]

Masking? Yes like a bank robber. Took me about 13 hours to get to the final tif you see on the below image.

[VitoDiVita]

Holy Shit.