# Red light a challenge for band photos. Strategies for red light?



## chris_w_digits (Mar 6, 2013)

Using a Rebel T2i and later, a 5D Mark III, I have found that red light is the most challenging environment for getting good results. I shoot at a venue that has several different colors of staqe lights and some bands seem to prefer only having the red ones on. While this looks cool in person, I've found that it is difficult to get good pictures preserving the red and have the images be bright enough since red is not a very highly illuminating color to our eyes. I like not using the flash (to preserve the rich color from the environment) and if any of the other color lights are on, I get great results and can work with the photos in post to get brighter results that are still colorful.

I did the math and found that red light only has the opportunity to oscillate roughly 9 times across the width of a pixel in the 5D3's sensor, while blue light can oscillate roughly 14 times across that same width. I find that subjects in red light do not look as sharp in the resulting image, and it's more apparent when one person is under a red stage light and another is under blue light (especially if a grayscale version is made), but I wouldn't think we're close enough to the limitation of being able to capture all the sharpness available in red light yet.

Have any of you experienced this with red light and what is your strategy for dealing with it?

Most common combos when shooting: 
Canon 5D Mark III: 70-200mm f/2.8L (non-IS version), Sigma 85mm f/1.4, Canon 135mm f/2 L .


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## stefsan (Mar 6, 2013)

The only thing I can think of may sound too simple and stupid but it worked best for me: waiting for the other lights to come on


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## jeff92k7 (Mar 6, 2013)

The best thing I have found when shooting concerts is to go to manual mode for pretty much everything. Set the aperture, shutter, and ISO where you need them for good pictures under most lighting colors. When the bands do all red lights, then you just keep shooting with the manual settings. Solid red lights, mainly from LEDs now, will throw off the camera if it is in any auto mode.

Also, if you're shooting RAW, then you have some flexibility afterwards in recovering shadow detail or pulling back highlights.


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## chris_w_digits (Mar 6, 2013)

For most acts, they do have the other lights on occasionally, although some bands just have red during their whole act, so waiting for other lights isn't an option. Just the slightest amount of blue or yellow makes a big difference in the quality I can get out of the images. I was more curious from a technical standpoint why red is such a difficult color. Pure blue or pure green gives great, stunning results, but pure red doesn't. 

On the T2i, solid red light generally tricked the camera into using one higher ISO setting than it should have, and I learned to set it to ISO 800 manually, but the 5D Mark III doesn't have that problem. I use Shutter priority and 1/160 second most of the time and the camera usually always "does the right thing". Bands are moving a lot and 1/160 will freeze the people while allowing the drumsticks to have some blur on them. For facial close-ups, the lens is usually wide open and the shallow depth of field works fine, with the person's face in focus and everything else blurred.

Forgot to mention -- I do shoot RAW and it does give a lot of opportunity for making better images afterward.


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## cayenne (Mar 6, 2013)

I'd heard this from another photog I read about..I think it was the "Fro".....but red lit concert stages make for FANTASTIC black and white photos!!

I'm quite the noob, but I had a bunch of them I took at Blues fest of Keb Mo at night down here last year, and on many shots, lots of red spots on him.

I took those 'red' shots into Aperture (you are shooting RAW aren't you?) and made them into B&W's or sepia..and played with the color sliders...and I ended up with some spectacular looking shots.

Give it a try.

HTH,

cayenne


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## East Wind Photography (Mar 6, 2013)

Sigh and you may also have AF and metering issues in red light. If you are working for the band and they are ok with a light, you can use an LED tactical flashlight to get AF and then turn it off....that is if you have a hard time getting AF in red light or otherwise low light. Works quite well and some even have a remote pressure switch.


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## Chuck Alaimo (Mar 6, 2013)

Red light just sucks in general. I shoot a lot of live concerts in a wide variety of venues. Red Lights are the worst. OK, the worst is actually when you have a smoke machine going and red light!!!!

more times than not, if a show uses red light 80% of the time, you can bet on seeing lots of results in b&w. Each venue is different, not all red light is bad. A little here and there can be quit nice. Backlit with red and front lit with white is nice for crisp faces. It's when a red spotlight is blasted on a person face that it just stinks. It makes the subject look like they have freckles, and a bad case of them. 

It's one of those things you can't control, but, you can get good results if you go b&w..or, silhouette.

here's some red light --

http://chuckalaimo.com/wp-content/uploads/wppa/920.jpg


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## hpmuc (Mar 6, 2013)

chris_w_digits said:


> I did the math and found that red light only has the opportunity to oscillate roughly 9 times across the width of a pixel in the 5D3's sensor, while blue light can oscillate roughly 14 times across that same width.



I don't think light oscillates in any way "across the width of a pixel"...


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## funkboy (Mar 7, 2013)

Experiment a lot in the beginning of the show & check your histograms to get a good idea of what your exposure should be (using the RGB histogram is especially important to make sure you don't blow the red channel), and then switch to manual. By the second or third tune you should have your settings dialed in. This also helps if there are spots swinging all over the place that dazzle your meter if you get one in the face, but I'd guess from your description that these are the kind of gigs where they just set the lights at the beginning & leave them there (probably just cheap PAR cans with gels).

If the only lightsources on the stage are cans with red gels, you will now have one channel (red) with useful data in it, and G & B will mostly contain noise. This is why it is especially important to shoot RAW & Expose to the Right so that your one channel has as much good data in it as possible.

Now bring your image into photoshop or lightroom or whatever you prefer to use, and go to the B&W channel mixer.

Personally I like to start with the red/orange/magenta channels turned all the way down so I can see if the other channels contain anything useful, or just noise. Turn down the noisy channels until the noise is gone, then bring up red & friends and play with them until you get a B&W image you like. Knowing how to use the tone curve is useful for tweaking here too.

Good luck & keep shooting. In my experience the bands really appreciate the pix.


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## Drizzt321 (Mar 7, 2013)

hpmuc said:


> chris_w_digits said:
> 
> 
> > I did the math and found that red light only has the opportunity to oscillate roughly 9 times across the width of a pixel in the 5D3's sensor, while blue light can oscillate roughly 14 times across that same width.
> ...



I think he's trying to say that the wavelength of red vs blue light, however he's waaaay over thinking things I think. Mostly it boils down to just about all of the rest of the advice in this thread. And expect to see lots of B&W images, often it's the only way to get something that looks half-way decent. But they can also turn out freaking awesome once you convert to B&W.


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## TAF (Mar 7, 2013)

cayenne said:


> I'd heard this from another photog I read about..I think it was the "Fro".....but red lit concert stages make for FANTASTIC black and white photos!!



+1


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## tog13 (Mar 7, 2013)

cayenne said:


> I'd heard this from another photog I read about..I think it was the "Fro".....but red lit concert stages make for FANTASTIC black and white photos!!
> 
> 
> 
> ...



I second (3rd/4th/etc.) this. I've done a ton of gig shots in the last ~15 years, many of them in poor (and sometimes red) light. Either embrace the B&W, or play with the WB (assuming you're shooting raw, and you should be for this type of work) to make whatever color you end up with really pop. Forget about trying to make it look "natural" - the data's just not there.


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## Chuck Alaimo (Mar 7, 2013)

here's 2...essentially the same shot...see how icky the red one is compared to the b&W???


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## Chuck Alaimo (Mar 7, 2013)

reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed...lol


love yellow though!


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## Mt Spokane Photography (Mar 7, 2013)

Green is essential for the auto exposure system. If its missing, you will need to use manual exposure. The camera is trying to expose to get the correct amount of brightness and it uses the green channel to do this.
Try manual exposure using the histogram of the red channel. It won't be wonderful, but can be much better.


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## Drizzt321 (Mar 7, 2013)

Mt Spokane Photography said:


> Green is essential for the auto exposure system. If its missing, you will need to use manual exposure. The camera is trying to expose to get the correct amount of brightness and it uses the green channel to do this.
> Try manual exposure using the histogram of the red channel. It won't be wonderful, but can be much better.



It uses the green channel to do AE? Interesting, never heard of that.


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## verysimplejason (Mar 7, 2013)

I'd say just keep it but keep saturation a little bit low. When I'm taking pictures, sometimes I want to preserve the feeling/mood that I get from the environment when I took the picture and most of the time it's all about lighting.


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## DCM1024 (Mar 7, 2013)

Mt Spokane Photography said:


> Green is essential for the auto exposure system. If its missing, you will need to use manual exposure. The camera is trying to expose to get the correct amount of brightness and it uses the green channel to do this.
> Try manual exposure using the histogram of the red channel. It won't be wonderful, but can be much better.



Oddly enough,I had just been wondering if photographers ever study the law of color. As a cosmetology instructor, I teach in on a regular basis. I would like to go back to some of my older photos, re-edit and apply.

Essentially, all three primary colors (red, blue, yellow) must be present for a natural look. Thus, if you have too much red you are missing blue and yellow, which combined make green. If I lighten a client's hair and it looks yellow, we tone with a violet-based blond - red+blue=violet.


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## Chris Burch (Mar 7, 2013)

That problem also happens with magenta, specifically from a powerful LED wash. As other have mentioned, converting to B&W did salvage most images, but I never found a good way to process the color versions. If you can slightly underexpose most of your shots it will give you a little more latitude in post. Once you ever expose on a strong red/magenta color cast, you won't have many options on the color side.


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## Halfrack (Mar 7, 2013)

Strobing white would be bad, but what if you gel your strobes green? A couple remote slaves up high pointing at the stage, turned to a low power setting? (I'm still in lighting 101)


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## bbb34 (Mar 7, 2013)

DCM1024 said:


> Oddly enough,I had just been wondering if photographers ever study the law of color. As a cosmetology instructor, I teach in on a regular basis. I would like to go back to some of my older photos, re-edit and apply.
> 
> Essentially, all three primary colors (red, blue, yellow) must be present for a natural look. Thus, if you have too much red you are missing blue and yellow, which combined make green. If I lighten a client's hair and it looks yellow, we tone with a violet-based blond - red+blue=violet.



There are no particular primary colors. You may choose them yourself. The set of your chosen primary colors spawns the gamut of secondary colors. There are better and worse primary color sets. Good primary colors can generate a maximum range of seconday colors.

Then you need to distinguish between additive and subtractive color mixing. When adding lights, red blue and green make pretty good primary colors. That's why the very most TVs are using them. Printers are subtracting lights with color pigments. Cyan, magenta, and yellow are a good set for subtractive mixing. 

Red, blue and yellow are pretty poor for mixing, although children learn to use them as primary colors with their paint-boxes.

Greetings,
bbb


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## cayenne (Mar 7, 2013)

Mt Spokane Photography said:


> Green is essential for the auto exposure system. If its missing, you will need to use manual exposure. The camera is trying to expose to get the correct amount of brightness and it uses the green channel to do this.
> Try manual exposure using the histogram of the red channel. It won't be wonderful, but can be much better.


Interesting info....

I'd think that especially in this type of shooting environment...that anything other than going full manual shouldn't be considered if you're wanting to get a high number of keepers would it?

At least, that's been the consensus of about everything I've read about concert photography so far...

I watched a lot of youtube videos from this guy awhile back, showing how he shoots concerts from the pit...and had some good advice.

I hesitate to put this link because he has mention of shooting a Justin bieber concert (shudder)...but anyway you might could get some info here, and he has a signup link for email (use a throw away account) and he has a short ebook on concert shooting which has some useful advice.

http://froknowsphoto.com/tag/concert-photography/

But I'd say, search youtube for the 'fro' and concert shooting, and stuff with redlights/B&W were covered in the ones I found and viewed.

HTH,

cayenne


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## Chuck Alaimo (Mar 7, 2013)

Halfrack said:


> Strobing white would be bad, but what if you gel your strobes green? A couple remote slaves up high pointing at the stage, turned to a low power setting? (I'm still in lighting 101)



Most venues won't let you use flash at all, much less remote slaves. Also, time vs pay, most of the time when I'm shooting live shows, the money paid pretty much means get in and out quick...I'm not arriving at a venue hours before doors open to set up strobes. And, depending on the band, they don't really care and or are aware that red lights suck...some I think even do it on purpose (most of the times you get 3 songs and your out, so many times I have been like please please please something other than red...red for the first 3, then the full spectrum after that!!!)


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## Mt Spokane Photography (Mar 7, 2013)

Drizzt321 said:


> Mt Spokane Photography said:
> 
> 
> > Green is essential for the auto exposure system. If its missing, you will need to use manual exposure. The camera is trying to expose to get the correct amount of brightness and it uses the green channel to do this.
> ...


 
A camera may use all the colors for exposure, but the luminance channel is almost always the same as the green channel. Get rid of green, and you fool the exposure system. Yellow has a lot of green in it, so it works fine.

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/histograms2.htm


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## Drizzt321 (Mar 7, 2013)

Mt Spokane Photography said:


> Drizzt321 said:
> 
> 
> > Mt Spokane Photography said:
> ...



Ah, very interesting, thank you. So modern AE systems use luminance for determining exposure, ok. How does that compare to a CdS light meter? Light meter reads based off of intensity, right? How would this correspond to luminance? Or is it not exact because a light meter doesn't read any type of color, merely how much light reflects off (or is incident on) a surface?


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## Cptn Rigo (Mar 7, 2013)

Chuck Alaimo said:


> reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed...lol
> 
> 
> love yellow though!




Coheed and cambria!!!! they rock!


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## chris_w_digits (Mar 8, 2013)

I sincerely appreciate the feedback I've gotten. My main strategy has been to "salvage" a lot of the red images by making them monochrome, or using the color temperature trick to turn the images a more purple color, as others mentioned, which can be desaturated a bit and not have as bad a "pink and white" look. If there is presence of any other color to a slight degree, it makes this trick work much better. I do shoot RAW so that gives me a lot of options for improving the look of the images. 

One thing that still puzzles me -- why is red the most problematic color rather than blue? For making a grayscale image out of RGB, the formula 0.299R + 0.587G + 0.114B is common (it's what the YIQ color system used by analog TV used for the luminance). From this, you'd think that since blue contributes the least to the grayscale, that it would be the problematic color. However, if something is lit with only blue light, the pictures come out great. Why red?


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## East Wind Photography (Mar 8, 2013)

Longer wavelength
Anti-aliasing filters
less AF sensitivity
Some sensors are more (or less) sensitive to red

I'm sure there are some other reasons but those come off the top of my head at the moment.



chris_w_digits said:


> I sincerely appreciate the feedback I've gotten. My main strategy has been to "salvage" a lot of the red images by making them monochrome, or using the color temperature trick to turn the images a more purple color, as others mentioned, which can be desaturated a bit and not have as bad a "pink and white" look. If there is presence of any other color to a slight degree, it makes this trick work much better. I do shoot RAW so that gives me a lot of options for improving the look of the images.
> 
> One thing that still puzzles me -- why is red the most problematic color rather than blue? For making a grayscale image out of RGB, the formula 0.299R + 0.587G + 0.114B is common (it's what the YIQ color system used by analog TV used for the luminance). From this, you'd think that since blue contributes the least to the grayscale, that it would be the problematic color. However, if something is lit with only blue light, the pictures come out great. Why red?


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## 7enderbender (Mar 11, 2013)

I can only reiterate what others have said. B/W is one way out to some degree. Obviously shoot all manual for more consistent results. And then if you work for a specific band try to point out what the issue is (in a way that drummers or even singers can understand) and see if they let you place a few strobes in a strategic places. If they let you you can even gel them. Or see if they can have at least a bit of white from FOH.

I've actually gone the gelled strobe route once for a band that really didn't have any colored stage lighting. I know that usually strobes and live music are considered a no-no but it's all in the communication. I've been playing as a musician for many years myself we were never concerned with flashes going off really. Certainly less annoying than the sea of cell phone screens at today's shows. Whatever happened to lighters?


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