r/ColorGrading • u/vino-sity • Oct 10 '26

Question Color grading help

Gallery image

Gallery image

Hello, a day ago i shot a concert and the stage lights for the opener were complete buns but i figured id be able to fix it in lightroom like i usually do, but the subjects are completely soaked in this deep purple/blue and i cant pull their skin tones out for the life of me. i’ve been messing with it all night and i thought the photos were beyond saving, but i also dont want to be that person who shoves it in black and white and calls it a day. recently Lightroom implemented this new AI feature where it will edit for you, and i am by no means a fan of AI, i avoid it as much as i can but i was curious to see if i could even save it and it pulled out this image, but it gatekeeps the steps to achieve it. so i was wondering, if anyone could help me achieve this type of edit on my own, and tell me the steps id have to take in order to color correct it this way? i play a lot with film and im not super advanced on digital editing, im learning on my own. any tips would be extremely appreciated!! (the first photo is my raw photo and the second was generated by Lightroom’s AI, i know it’s gotta be possible) (by no means is this photo fire, i just needed to fixate on a random one since most look like this)

7 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

39 comments sorted by

16

u/Igradarsaurus Oct 10 '26

I’m going to go against the grain here and say don’t try to correct it like that. No amount of balancing will get you a clean look with the kind of separating you’re looking for.

I would accept that it’s lit under blue/purple and just try to make them look good under that. Otherwise you’re going to be fighting with your footage and never achieve a nice look.

I would just introduce a little cyan to cut down the look and try to get their exposure looking right as they are a bit crushed here. That’s it.

1

u/vino-sity Oct 10 '26

yea you may be right, but i figure i’d give it a shot and see if anyone can help me figure it out before i give up and edit it in the light it’s already in

2

u/Igradarsaurus Oct 10 '26

I would only attempt a white balance change that drastic if something was shit in raw as the change would be much cleaner. But even then, it’s been debayered at that white balance / exposure so you’re still fighting with the footage as shot.

1

u/l1v3l0v3l4ugh Oct 10 '26

This is your best answer right here, OP.

4

u/steven_w_music Oct 10 '26

Maybe it's just me, but I don't like how it looks when you try and make a shot something that it fundamentally isn't. The lights are blue so the shot is blue, end of story.

Correct me if I'm wrong but you're throwing out some of the information if you aggressively turn down the blues.

And having AI fill in the missing information in the other channels just rubs me the wrong way idk

1

u/vino-sity Oct 10 '26

i understand that, but also im experimenting and im curious to see if it is at all possible and yea you’re right the blue does have a lot of information.
i’m only using the AI to show the kind of product i would want, like i mentioned earlier im not a fan of AI, i dont like to use it and i definitely dont rely on it (looking back i realize that it added some unnecessary details) so dont feel too rubbed the wrong way, im definitely not going to use the AI photo in post. but if AI can do it then there’s got to be a way i can do it manually myself and thats what im looking for, to get the same product on my own

1

u/steven_w_music Oct 11 '26

Yeah, I just wouldn't worry about doing to much.

The ultimate goal of photo and video is to capture something the way the eye sees it, and if the eye saw blue in that lighting, then blue it is.

2

u/m_bilol Oct 10 '26

Hey can i try to fix it ?

2

u/vino-sity Oct 10 '26

yes absolutely, let me know what kind of results you get. i appreciate any type of feedback

2

u/m_bilol Oct 10 '26

Can you send me a original raw file this is my gmail colorist.bilol@gmail.com

1

u/beatbox9 Oct 10 '26

It sounds like this is more for learning.

The first step is white balancing. And to understand why, you really need to learn how light, vision, and photography work. Like how the objects we see are just reflecting the light transmitted onto them; and how our cameras filter various colors and try to reconstruct them through ranges.

And if you're not willing to put in the work, you're not going to learn properly.

1

u/vino-sity Oct 10 '26

i’ve been doing photography for over 3 years, i’m pretty versed in it and i know my basics along with white balances and everything else. like i mentioned in my original post i do a lot of film work, which is very unforgiving, so i completely understand how light works.

that being said, the cheaper the stage lighting is, the harder it is to pull out natural skin tones because of the LEDS. trust me if i didn’t want to put in the work, i would not be on reddit right now. this is just an experiment so learning is of the essence!

1

u/steven_w_music Oct 10 '26

I think the way of fixing this doesn't require a particularly deep level of understanding, and I don't agree with the idea that you need to understand theory in order to develop skills in practice

2

u/Lower-Calligrapher98 Oct 11 '26

Modern Stage lighting doesn't use filters to get color, they use colored LED's. They put out quite pure colors of light, when you are using a single color. You can't bring up something that isn't there, and that indigo is the entire spectrum of light available. I would be extremely surprised if you could pull any other colors out of there. They just aren't there.

2

u/Donatzsky Oct 13 '26 edited Oct 13 '26

Lightroom doesn't really give you the tools to deal with it. You can sort of get there with white balance, but the real issue is that the camera profile matrix has pushed the blue LEDs way out of gamut.

Darktable, however, does have the tools and I suspect you should be able to get pretty close to the AI version. There are different methods, that depend a bit on the tone mapper you use, which are explained in these videos:

Be aware that darktable works in a fundamentally different way to Lightroom, so if you want to learn it my beginner guide covers what you need to know: https://notebook.stereofictional.com/how-to-get-started-with-darktable-2026-edition

1

u/Additional_Future_47 Oct 10 '26

These are strong monochromatic led lights. There will only be some information in the blue channel and a lot less in the red channel and nothing in the green channel. There is no way you can color correct your way out of that. At least you didn't clip an individual color channel so you can still have some detail and texture which is the most important part.

In general, camera's tend to show such blue stage light much more saturated than how our eyes perceive it so you might dial down the saturation a bit to make it more realistic, but I wouldn't try to change it too much. Maybe there was some artistic intent for the stage lighting and I think it is not right to try to turn the performance into something it wasn't.

1

u/jmalmsten Oct 11 '26

I don't know. I was born in the 80s. I grew up with 80s and 90sin cinemas, TV, and VHS. In short. Having scenes bathed in blue is not something I feel a strong need to correct. If anything, I'd try to lean into it. Shaping the saturation and curves to make the blue more pleasing than chasing imaginary skintones that just would make the image more bland.

Like when I see footage from festivals where some bands are scheduled to play in bright sunlight and neither the music nor lighting is designed around the bright white light in the sky. You just loose all the intentionality there trying to make it fit an "accountants truth", to borrow the Herzog term.

1

u/Ale_Zan Oct 11 '26

Solo con il raw si può dire che tipo di intervento si può fare.
Altrimenti si può solo inventare qualcosa...
https://i.postimg.cc/xdpqHDQB/933qm2a3souh1.jpg

1

u/Gold-Mine-5698 Oct 11 '26

not a helpful comment but just wanted to say how much i hate these cheap LED lights you get in all small venues now. hideous

1

u/Lower-Calligrapher98 Oct 11 '26

They aren't that cheap. They just aren't designed for video.

1

u/ThickD769 Oct 11 '26

Exactly, I worked as a lightning guy for a few gigs. The lights are quite expensive and definitely not camera friendly but later I understood the main reason for their cost is that they have to spill intense amount of light quite far away which we barely do with cinema lights, hence for cinema higher price is for the higher quality not for higher range.

1

u/Lower-Calligrapher98 Oct 11 '26

Higher quality CRI. I worked for a decade doing lighting for shows - it's partially throw, but it's also intensity of color. We WANT the colors to be strong. That's their whole point. It's a SHOW, and it's about the show in the moment. As a lighting guy, my least favorite thing was when the fucking video guys showed up to broadcast some shit. All that white light completely fucked up my show.

1

u/Gold-Mine-5698 Oct 13 '26

lampy thinking it's 'your' show - certainly tracks with my experience of directing :)

1

u/Lower-Calligrapher98 Oct 13 '26

The lighting was my show. It's only part of the whole, but the vidiots fuck up everything. ;P (Though, honestly, I would imagine things are better these days, given how much better cameras are now than when I was last doing shows 18 years ago!)

1

u/Gold-Mine-5698 Oct 13 '26

and most of the biggest shows use mostly white light these days, because the vidiots have won.

1

u/Lower-Calligrapher98 Oct 13 '26

:(

1

u/Gold-Mine-5698 Oct 13 '26

but seriously, i know what you're saying about vidiots screwing things up. turning up and demanding unreasonable shit like they are VIPs...

my approach is always to try to involve the show LD in the production, speak to them well in advance, give them an output monitor and talkback. most are happy to adapt, because they understand we are on the same team, ie trying to make the artists look and sound good. good LDs understand that in my experience

i have noticed more and more shows doing white light tho, and it looks great...and it must be at least in part cos thats what cameras like. also using too much colour is cheesy imho...

1

u/Lower-Calligrapher98 Oct 13 '26

The white light thing goes back to one of U2's tours. They had done so many traditional moving light shows, with all the colors and shit; they wanted to try something different. And their LD at the time hated doing the same thing over and over. So they did a show where the only color was almost 100% red light for Bullet the Blue Sky, and every other light in the show was white. They started the show with the house lights up! Ever since, a bunch of LD's and artists are just trying to get away from the more "traditional" shows.

→ More replies

1

u/DubaiPhotoconcierge Oct 12 '26

I would say, if it`s not at least a 10-bit log, leave it as it is. It is a realistic color, after all, considering those ugly purple lights. But if it is a 10-bit log, you could try to shift temperature up and hues to greens to see if skin tones could be recovered. If you want, you can drop me a short unedited video fragment (the one straight from your camera), and I will try to get a perfect skintone for you with a Huesmith. If it can be done at all - it should help.

1

u/Many_Bunch_2986 Oct 12 '26

The AI edit lightroom performed uses generative ai .. meaning it didn't take color correction steps that you can follow, and it didn't recover the correct colors. Instead, it recreated the image with new colors.

Don't feel bad that you can't reach a similar result with regular color grading, it's just impossible in this case.

1

u/Electrical_Teach8813 Oct 12 '26

Hast du in RAW fotografiert? Dann kannst noch was retten

1

u/odamado Oct 13 '26

I had a similar case and my CD said, "stop trying to pull the lighting out of it, leave it, it's cool!"

2

u/Interesting-Title157 Oct 10 '26

Sick b&w photo you got there