Gigs with strong red/purple lights

[dan_yell]

Hello

i really struggle on PP to deal with gigs that have heavy red or purple lights, these seem worse than other lights and i seem to end up with a pile of s***e as a result. I admit i'm not particularly scientific in my post production, so I doubt any advice would be teaching me to suck eggs, but having shot gigs for a few years now, I seem to be able to deal with other things in post production ok, but red lights are just evil.

any advice appreciated!

Danielle

 

[RichardTaylor]

For classical music concerts, where the lighting director has gone a bit overboard, I just make the "horror" images B&W.

 

[Jayst84]

It can be a b*****d, especially if it completely blows then even converting to black and white won't help you much. I usually set the camera profile in Lightroom to 'neutral' as a starting point (shooting on Canon cameras), and then reduce vibrance, and tweak the red channel with the hue slider.

Don't think there's really any magic bullet, you just have to be careful with your exposures and hope the whole thing isn't blasted with red light leaving you with no skin tones.

 

[dan_yell]

Thanks guys, I think my exspoure last night is prob the reason I wasn't able to get great results in PP, kinda left with nothing but red. Ugh it was hideous.

Will have a look at the light room profile for the future tho, thanks

 

[JonathanRyan]

Basically, you’re screwed. Assuming you are using a camera with a bayer matrix then the lighting is stopping you down to 1/4 of the resolution and no post procssing on earth (short of redrawing it) will fix that. Red lights make your £x000 DSLR into a lego camera.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_filter

 

[Graham W]

I've been doing gig photography for years. Red light, so loved by lighting engineers the world over was a nightmare with film. When I went digital I thought my problems were over...they weren't.

 

[steveb]

Red lights, and hi viz yellow jackets, are a photographers nightmare. I simply try to avoid shooting under red light while its active, if I can.

 

[Andy Taylor]

How old is your camera? My D200 doesn't cope nearly as well as my D7000.

Secondly, are you shooting RAW or JPEG? RAW is definitely recommended.

 

[dan_yell]

Its a 5dII and yep, shooting in raw. it was very irritating, i've shot at this venue tons and have never experienced such lighting. it was a christmas show so perhaps they got a bit carried away with the santa theme. I figured I was probably lacking in knowledge to be able to try and compensate at the time or in post processing, as well as it being a pile of s*** to begin with. Fingers crossed for no red lights next time...

 

[analoganx]

Used to do a fair bit of live music photography. I'd generally go for a B&W conversion whenever the red lights had gone overboard.

 

[dan_yell]

Yeah, I tried a bit of that - only I hadn't really got the nailed the exposure, so even in black and white, it was a bit s***. I usually put at least one photo from a gig on my flickr, but nothing here I'd want to. I might have a another go with a couple and see if I can salvage anything