interpreting color histograms

D
Posted By
DaveEdwards
May 2, 2005
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332
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2
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When viewing the PSE3 color histogram, in many cases the red is farther to the right than the blue, which is almost always towards the left. Does this have anything to do with an image’s proper color balance, or is it just a reflection of the colors and light in the scene? If it’s the latter and the subject matter, there’s nothing much to be done. If it’s the former, what type of steps can be taken to bring the colors into balance?

I am familiar with color cast corrections, but this is a little hit or miss and hard to apply equally to a set of 4 or 5 interior photos. Color variations? Or desaturate the red by 10-20%?

I believe my monitor is reasonably well calibrated (but it’s an ibook). Do histograms like this suggest some action on my part?

Thank you !
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ML
Mark_Levesque
May 3, 2005
When viewing the PSE3 color histogram, in many cases the red is farther to the right than the blue, which is almost always towards the left. Does this have anything to do with an image’s proper color balance, or is it just a reflection of the colors and light in the scene? If it’s the latter and the subject matter, there’s nothing
much to be done. If it’s the former, what type of steps can be taken to bring the colors into balance?

Do your colors appear skewed to you, or do they look natural? Certainly subjects can significantly affect the histograms, but if it’s happening all the time you could have an inappropriate white balance setting or something that is causing an issue.

Do histograms like this suggest some action on my part?

Do your photos look good to your eye both on the monitor and in print? If so, I would imagine that there’s nothing to be done to them. If, on the other hand, they look overly warm, then the first thing I’d do is to check the white balance setting on my camera. If corrections were needed, I’d start with a levels adjustment layer in which I adjusted the color channels individually.
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DaveEdwards
May 4, 2005
Thanks for your response.

Interior shots often have a pinkish cast to them. The room may be 90% natural light with a few incandescent lights on, so I usually leave the white balance setting on auto. With lighting like this the tungsten setting creates images excessively blue. However, with no or little natural light, but mostly tungsten, this setting is appropriate.

I’ve not had great success adjusting the individual color channels. Most histograms are far from a perfect bell curve, so it takes some time and experimentation to get just one image right, and I may have ten at a time to deal with. One thing that can work at times is moving the red hue to +5, strange as that sounds now that I type it.

Should I try the IgnoreEXIF plug-in? I recall someone here saying it seemed his problem was only 10% monitor calibration and 90% EXIF data.

(PSE, OSX ibook, Fuji S2Pro)

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