Yesterday I addressed the issue of blown out lights in an HDR image. Today I tackle different colored lights in an image. This is common in any interior or urban night shot. Often you will find all of the lights have a constant tungsten or fluorescent white balance except for one or two. I think these kinds of light bulbs that give a different color are sodium vapor or mercury vapor. Sometimes they may be a fluorescent bulb mixed with tungsten lighting.
Most of the lamps around the University of Chicago campus give a nice warm tungsten glow. But every so often you will find one that gives off an other-worldly yellow/green color. I want to turn this color to match the tungsten bulbs. What I do is identify the offending color. You can try altering each of the colors in the HSL panel in Lightroom and see which one affects the color you want to change. For my night shots at UofC I need to change the hue of the yellows. I pushed it to the orange end of the color spectrum. This changed the yellow-green to orange without affecting any other colors. After analyzing the two images, I may like the uncorrected version better. But there are many times when you have too many colors competing for attention. This is when you want to employ this technique.
Greenish-yellow lamps
“corrected” lamps
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