Fix the Orange Cast in your Photos the Free Quick and Easy Way

Closet Kine

New Member
Hello Fellow 420 Maggers,

I thought I would put together a quick tutorial on how to remove the orange color cast created by HPS lights. I recently started my first grow so I'm not very useful to other members as far a giving advice on their grows so I thought this would be a good way to contribute to the cause.

I don't know about you folks but for me it's hard to follow along with a grow when the pictures have that harsh HPS orange tint. It makes judging the color of the plants impossible, masks detail, and quite frankly hurts my eyes after a long 420mag session. I figured if people knew that this could be done both easily and most importantly for free that it would help members get more accurate advice from fellow growers and overall make the site prettier.

Disclaimer time: This tutorial is extremely basic and is for novice photographers. If you are an advanced user and have an SLR you should have a way to do this already. There are ways to get better results than this method but they require either buying expensive software (Photoshop) or using free software (GIMP) which is not user friendly.

This method will use a free piece of software from Google called Picasa which is a very simple image manipulation software. Please download and install it now.

Finished? Okay moving on. Upon opening the program for the first time it will scan your hard drive and find all of the pictures suitable for manipulation. It will look like this...

SP32-20100329-221851.jpg


Simply double click the photo you want to correct and a new screen will open that looks like this...

SP32-20100329-221857.jpg


On the left side you will notice a panel with three tabs labeled Basic Fixes, Tuning, and Effects. We are only concerned with the Tuning tab so go ahead and select it now, it will look like this...

SP32-20100329-222039.jpg


Under the Neutral Color Picker heading you will see a black circle and next to it a button that looks like an ink dropper. Select the ink dropper now.
Next go to the image and find an area that should be light gray. For my image I chose the shadow area between the cups. Select it now.
The image should change to something that looks a little more normal. If you are not satisfied with how the correction turned out you can select undo and make your selection again. Sometimes it takes a couple of tries. The undo button is right under the black circle. This is how mine turned out...

SP32-20100329-222106.jpg


That's pretty much it, save your photo to the folder of your choice and you are done. Note that this is a starting point for getting started with photo correction and there are many more features in this program that could help enhance your photographs even further. I encourage you to give some of these a try, you always have the undo button...

For comparison I have the finished photo that I created in Photoshop. It does look better than the method described above but takes considerably longer and Photoshop costs a mint. Behold...

DSC_0009_corrected.jpg


Any comments or critiques as well as alternate methods are welcome. Also if you get a chance check out my grow. Until next time...
 
Back
Top Bottom