Night Photography, High Speed ISO and Those Gold and Red Hues
You know if you’ve tried shooting in low light and wanted to avoid washing out everything with harsh flash that you’re going to end up with either blurry photos or those reddish gold hues that come with pushing up the ISO toward that 1600 mark. Everything looks either pink or yellow or in between.
The information you saw when you took the shot is still there, but you need to use photoshop (or the free opensource Gimp) to extract it and suppress the reds.
Use plenty of layers and both tools, levels and curves to suppress the reds (curves) and bring out the light. Layers will allow you to accomplish much the same as HDR photography, adjusting separate portions of the photo to blend dark and light areas better.
Here’s a sample. In the original photo, the lights of the windows and areas near the outdoor lights are properly exposed but everything has that 1600 ISO red cast. The darker areas are invisible in the source photo but the information is there. After making adjustments in photoshop, the second version is produced. A free Dream Suite component by FX Studio renders the third version after making all the adjustments in photoshop for the second.
