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 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

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

Thanks as always to every­one that sent com­ments by email about our last pod­cast. Although ALL com­ments are appre­ci­ated, com­ment­ing directly in this blog is pre­ferred. Thanks as well to all the new mem­bers of the bul­letin board.

If you are look­ing at this mate­r­ial on any other site except Photography.ca — Please hop on over to the Photography.ca blog and pod­cast and get this and other pho­tog­ra­phy info directly from the source. I Sub­scribe with iTunes I Sub­scribe via RSS feed I Sub­scribe with Google Reader I Sub­scribe for free to the Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast — Photography.ca and get all the posts/podcasts by Email
You can down­load this pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast directly by click­ing the pre­ced­ing link or lis­ten to it almost imme­di­ately with the embed­ded player below.

Pod­cast: Play in new win­dow | Down­load