White Balance Ooops

Fisherman's Moonrise

A Flickr photographer asked me how I did this shot and edited it. It was a little involved and actually was caused by not resetting my white balance from a previous shoot.

This is what I told her:

Late yesterday afternoon I went to the dock across from Fisherman's Wharf in Marina Del Rey to shoot the moonrise. I was disappointed as I had to wait until it got higher than the low clouds which had moved in.

Since I wasn't pleased by what was happening, I got distracted and forgot to reset my white balance. I had set the white balance on my camera to custom a few nights before to shoot a sunset which was rather yellow. So the camera did a lot of coloring you see here.

I took the best 8 exposures at f16 and ISO 100 out of 15 auto bracketed shots. I combined them in photomatix into an HDR which I then tonemapped in photomatix also. I usually start out with the defaults, then I first look at the white and black levels. The moon was overexposed in most of the shots so I lowered the white level and left the black level alone. I turned up microcontrast as the wharf was quite a distance across the inlet. I increased saturation a little but not as much as this looks. I also raised the strength level to 90%. By now my image was on the dark side so I shifted the gamma to the right which brightened the midtones. I then saved out a tif.

I brought the tif file into photoshop and used imagenomic's noiseware to clean up the noise in the sky. I use levels, and shadow/highlight to make a nice bell curve out of the histogram. I then adjust exposure, enhance contrast and sharpen using smart sharpen or unsharp mask, I can't remember which one but generally it's which one works best.

I also have written a filter in filter forge which I sometimes use to give it an Orton effect. I didn't use this on this image though.

There you have my basic routine but I did't limit myself to this as every photo is different. Sometimes I drop the image into every filter I have just to look at it.

As I told her above this is pretty much my standard routine with variations for all my shots.