65 — Color casts — correcting color casts — Interview with Dominic Fuizzotto

Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast #65 fea­tures an inter­view with Mon­treal Wed­ding pho­tog­ra­pher Dominic Fuiz­zotto. In the inter­view we talk about why colour casts hap­pen and how to cor­rect colour casts.‚ When images have a colour cast they usu­ally just don’t look right and it is our job as pho­tog­ra­phers to get rid of bad colour casts.

The image at left has a strong yellow/orange cast. We easily see the cast in the brides dress which is white. The cast is removed in the photo on the right and the brides dress is now white. Image by Dominic Fuizzotto

The image at left has a strong yellow/orange cast. We see the cast in the bride’s dress which is NOT white. The cast is removed in the photo on the right and the bride’s dress is now white. Thanks to Dominic Fuiz­zotto for these examples.

One IMPORTANT thing that I for­got to men­tion in the pod­cast is that on the rare occa­sion you may actu­ally WANT to intro­duce a colour cast into an image as in the photo below. This can be done eas­ily in Pho­to­shop but it can also be done by using gels on lights or by set­ting your camera’s white bal­ance to the wrong set­ting on purpose.

This image has a delib­er­ate green/yellow cast. Most times you don’t want this but some­times like in this shot, it works and adds to the shot.

The colour wheel in photography

The colour wheel in photography


This is the colour wheel that most pho­tog­ra­phers use whether they know it or not.‚ White light is made of red, green and blue light. The com­pli­men­tary or oppo­site colours of red, green and blue are cyan, magenta and yel­low respec­tively. In order to reduce a colour cast, we need to intro­duce its oppo­site into the image.‚ There­fore, if an image has a blue cast we reduce that cast by adding yel­low into the image.

Links men­tioned in this pod­cast:
Dominic Fuiz­zotto Pho­tog­ra­phy
April’s por­trait assign­ment on the Photography.ca forum

If you are still lurk­ing on our forum,
feel free to join our friendly :) Pho­tog­ra­phy forum

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Comments

  1. Manny says:

    Great stuff Marko. As much as one knows there is always more to learn. Even relearn­ing the things that we already know. Keep up the good work.

    Manny

  2. Susan says:

    Marko — as always — great infor­ma­tion and a huge thank you to your guest pod­caster — Mr. Fuizzotto!!

    I started with this one and see that you have many more below here.. WOW! Will spend some­time catch­ing up on the blog/podcast!

    Thanks for all that you give us!!

  3. jlabel says:

    Hello Marko great pod­cast, I think you could make another pod­cast about color, how a color is made, rain­bows, white light, color tem­per­a­tures. I think it is miss­ing since all our dig­i­tal cam­eras and our eyes do see colour and color cast is usu­ally some mix of color tem­per­a­tures (wed­dings usu­ally have var­i­ous light sources which emanates dif­fer­ent tem­per­a­tures thus color casts). I don know if i can say this but there is a soft­ware made by Nik Sofware called Viveza, it helps you fix locally color casts. and is a Pho­to­shop plu­gin and is incor­po­rated in Nikon Cap­ture NX.

  4. edgardo a. bayani says:

    this is very help­ful for pho­tog­ra­phers to cor­rect the color casts.
    a good thing there are very few who print color neg­a­tives now because the cor­rec­tion would be the oppo­site. if you have a yel­low cast, add yel­low to intro­duce blue, or reduce blue because blue causes it to have a yel­low cast.

  5. Kat says:

    Loads of great infor­ma­tion and tips, lots that I didn’t know and will be try­ing out! Great pod­cast, one that will be lis­ten to sev­eral times! :)

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