Revisiting Color Cast

In yesterday's post I showed you how I just turned a photograph of my daughter, nephew and mom to a black and white picture rather than try to correct a dramatic red color cast.

I'm still quite satisfied with the B/W version but I've discovered that Photoshop does offer an alternative.

I don't know if such an adjustment is available in Photoshop Elements but you can find ways of diminishing or increasing certain colors within an image. In Photoshop CS4 I used the Variations adjustment which gives you several options and allows for some adjustment of the changes.

 I chose a coarse adjustment of the midtones that left the image a little under saturated and slightly yellow but not too bad.

I further reduced the yellows and added some noise reduction and ended up with a photograph that looks much better than the totally red overcast one with which I started.  I did try using other adjustments to reduce the red and, for instance, move the color balance slider toward cyan but the adjustment wasn't as fine ad in the variations adjustment.

I told you I'd be dealing with photographs taken before I was born in today's post but I think I'll hold that until tomorrow since I wanted to tell you what I learned about correcting a strong color cast in the interim since yesterday. I will, however, tell you about the camera my dad's holding in this photograph.

It looks to me like a Rolleicord, a twin lens reflex camera, as you may have noticed, to which my dad has added an accessory flash attachment. The Rolleicord was a lower priced version of the Rolleiflex twin lens reflex camera that was very popular in several models from the 30s well in to the 60s.

My dad probably got that camera used or even as a hand me down from an older brother. He didn't make much money but he and his 8 brothers would get cameras from pawn shops or other sources, some of which were never explained, and share them with each other. I'm reminded of the timeless warning, "Never buy a watch from a man who's out of breath." The same holds true for cameras.


Tomorrow I really will deal with a couple of my favorite photographs from the 30s.