White Balance

In a wedding, most of the time the lighting of hotel ballrooms, restaurants are very warm in colour. It makes the photos very yellowish. The yellowish effect sometimes gives a very nice effect on the photos, but sadly to say, not all the time. The following 2 shots were taken in a restaurant.




The lighting there was totally warm. I was a 'strong believer' in taking photos without flash (I did not have an external flash). I thought the photos would be nicer without flash (Well, I admit that I did not know anything about flash at that moment). I refused to use the internal flash on camera because I really do not like the harsh effect on the objects.

I quite like the yellowish effect of these 2 photos. But I thought of giving it a try to adjust the colour of them. I used the 'Level Adjustment' tool in photoshop (Image -> Adjustments -> Levels) to play with the colours. I adjusted the Red/Green/Blue (RGB) channel separately (by selecting the colour in the Channel drop down menu).

In RGB mode, R channel is to adjust red and cyan; G channel is to adjust green and magneta; B channel is to adjust blue and yellow. So, to get a proper white balance image, I adjusted the blue channel of the images above to reduce the yellowish effect. I did some slight adjustments on the other channels too. Below are the end results after adjusting the colours.




Album: http://picasaweb.google.com/kcshashin/WeddingShots7Dec2008

Post processing

The photo on the right is a photo that I should have turned on the flash when pressing down the shutter. I like this photo a lot but it was under exposed, noisy and it has lens flare.

So I decided to do some post processing on the photo.

First step was to remove the blue dots caused by the lens flare. I used the clone stamp tool in photoshop and cloned the area around the blue dots. The work done is rough and I shall improve on the skill.

After clearing all the flare effect around the black suit and groom's face, I thought it might show up better with a vintage feel. I followed Veerle's blog to get an idea on how to create vintage feel. You may google on how to create vintage feel in photoshop. You will get many tutorials from the web. Just select whichever that best suits your work.

I adjusted the brightness, contrast, colors, saturation, etc on the photo based on my preference. And the final touch was to add in the vignette effect. Yah, I did this step last...

Photo on the left is after post processing.

This 2nd march in, the couple walked very fast...

Lovely and cheerful couple!

Album: http://picasaweb.google.com/kcshashin/WeddingShots30Oct2009