Question Of The Day

A reader asks:

“A lot of the bars/venues I’ve been to have been showered in red spot light and it has horrible effect on my photos. Is there anything I can do, maybe in lightroom to lessen the effect, or maybe while shooting?”

My advice: Expose well. Use the histogram, color histogram if possible, to expose well: bright, but avoid blowing out reds. Use high ISO. You’ll want a modern high ISO camera, or/and a prime men’s. That will allow a fast enough shutter speed to freeze motion.

2 thoughts on “Question Of The Day

  1. ‘“A lot of the bars/venues I’ve been to have been showered in red spot light and it has horrible effect on my photos. Is there anything I can do, maybe in lightroom to lessen the effect, or maybe while shooting?”

    My advice: Expose well. Use the histogram, color histogram if possible, to expose well: bright, but avoid blowing out reds. Use high ISO. You’ll want a modern high ISO camera, or/and a prime men’s. That will allow a fast enough shutter speed to freeze motion. ‘

    I think the reader’s question was: Everyone one in my photo has ugly red skin tone because of the red lights in the bar. How do I fix that?

    Three possible fixes come to mind:
    1) Shoot with a flash that can overpower the spotlight enough to render a reasonable skin tone, and perhaps drag the shutter to keep the ambient light not falling on the subject.
    2) Shoot to raw files, then use white balance and saturation controls in ACR to adjust to a more pleasing skin tone.
    3) Convert the photo to B&W in ACR/Lightroom/Photoshop using the controls available to get a pleasing result.

    If shot to raw and Photoshop is available, the raw file could be processed a couple of times, once for the room and once for skin tones then the results could be put together in layers with masks to get a final image.

    Of course, you still need a good exposure to start with!

    • Indeed, Ron. The reason I stressed RAW and the histogram is exactly that: to ensure that the maximum information is gathered in the file., The rest is easily done in Lightroom (or PS, but Lightroom is easier, and imho better, as it does not force a commit af the RAW file conversion at the start).

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