Night photography and orange hue from street lights

I've been doing a lot of night photography and I keep getting stuck trying to counter the orange hue that comes from the street lights. I'm not sure if it's a tungsten element or ? but they all seem to give off an orange/red hue. It seems there's nothing I can do to remove it short of turning it into a B&W image. I've had some success by selectively desaturating that color but it's not always feasible. I've thought about using an orange filter but I'm afraid that would just complicate all the other colors.

So has anyone figured out a way to get rid of this orange hue?

I'm assuming white balance is OK in the rest of the photo?

Got a couple options:

1. Use a Photoshop color balance layer with a mask for only the street lamp.
2. Use a Nik tool (Viveza 2, Capture NX2, Color Efex Pro 4) with control points to apply a white balance adjustment to only the effected areas.

I know you've got Photoshop, so an adjustment layer with a mask seems to be the most straightforward.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about. There's a light up on the cliff behind me that gives off an orange hue. So when I adjust the WB to turn the sky to blue the orange changes to a pink-ish color. I took these images this morning before sunup and it's a bummer than the only way I can make these look natural is in B&W.

I still think layer mask approach will work best. Either use an adjustment layer to get the bottom half looking the way you want and paint out adjustments to the top (it gets less obvious the farther up you go, so you can lessen the opacity to blend the change), or leave the background image as original, tune a second copy of the same image so that the foreground removes the cast, stack the two and mask out the portions of the adjusted image that you don't want, again tweaking opacity levels so that it blends better.

Dave_W said:

Here's an example of what I'm talking about. There's a light up on the cliff behind me that gives off an orange hue. So when I adjust the WB to turn the sky to blue the orange changes to a pink-ish color. I took these images this morning before sunup and it's a bummer than the only way I can make these look natural is in B&W.

View attachment 28717View attachment 28718

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Quick edit

And here's another quick edit (literally 20 seconds) using the White Neutralizer filter from Nik's Color Efex Pro 4. Thought I might need to use negative control points for the sky but nope. A second filter application could eliminate the remaining cast. (oops - wrong file first time)

And another quick edit showing a graduated layer.

Thanks guys! You begin to see the problem, that pesky pink is a tough cookie. A layer mask is something I've not yet tried and sounds like it might work.

And if you're bored enough and want to play with the DNG file, here's a link to my public drop box that has this image file in it.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/9rpxyvjwew6ay64/xI0Id5UdM-

It's uploading at the moment so give it a min or two and it should be there.

I de-saturated it a bit more from the original.

Ah, that's looking better. Thanks Jake and muzza. It's definitely better than where I left off. I'll give both routes a try. Thanks!

I'm a complete novice when it comes to masks, but I've tripled my knowledge and ability in the last 3 days watching a few of the Photoshop workshops on the CreativeLive Photoshop week broadcasts.

I'm booked solid the rest of the afternoon (work - sheesh!!), but I'll play with it tonight and stick a PSD or TIFF file somewhere for you to take a look at so you can see what I did. If I mess with the RAW file I'll save you a sidecar.

Here is something I managed to get from the file.

And a different version with 2 x grad filters.


And another...

Nice!!! That looks much better. I see you're using the grad filters but what did you do with them? Did you change up the WB or the color hue? I've been using LR so much I've almost forgotten about ACR.

Dave_W said:

Nice!!! That looks much better. I see you're using the grad filters but what did you do with them? Did you change up the WB or the color hue? I've been using LR so much I've almost forgotten about ACR.

Click to expand...

Dave honestly I just change things until they look good, in the first pic it shows the settings of one Grad filter . I am sure you can have a play and see what you come up with. These were done in PS 6 and LR 4 depending on how I felt or what program my MBP decided to open lol.