The dark side of digital cameras
I don’t know why this isn’t mentioned in books and forums, but we certainly see it often with even the best digital cameras.
In shots taken with on-board flash, the poor fair-skinned caucasian with little skin pigment, a redish complexion, or blemishes goes nuclear:
Neither your eye nor film sees near-infrared light. But common in-camera and on-board flashes emit it, fair caucasians reflect it, and digital cameras record it. And they record it as extra red your eye didn’t see.
It’s a tough problem because correcting a nuclearized face by removing magenta, adding yellow, etc., makes everyone else look like they were semeared with bronzing makeup. The only way to do it seems to be to mask off the offending area and correct just that part, as some autocorrect software does like i2e.
Here’s more info on the problem.
Anyone else seen this and have something to contribute?
August 4th, 2005 at 1:29 am
In Photoshop, the key is “selective” color. It’s an adjustment you can make, and boy does it have options. Instead of just tweaking RGB for highlights, mids, and shadows, you can tweak the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black for the colors Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue, Magenta, White, Neutral, and Black. Yowzer! I dunno, maybe you already know about this. But all I’ve done is made actions for the various, and numerous, different types of man-made lighting. Most handy to me seem to be going into Yellow and turning down the Yellow, that helps reign in artificial stage light if you just can’t nail it with your WB. But of course, the possibilities are endless!
…Us poor pink-skinned people. I need a tan…
-Matt-
September 25th, 2005 at 2:17 pm
Not trying to be a smart-aleck but if you have a great shot of a group and with the mean red face problem, there is always black and white, or sepia, etc…
It will almost certainly look more natural.
November 22nd, 2006 at 5:32 pm
yes, been well discussed. so why not an IR filter in the lens?
cheersIAN