On election night I stopped by the spontaneous revelry in the streets near Pike Place Market to get a news photo. The street lighting was that common sodium vapor lighting-- extremely yellow. It's even more yellow than the usual tungsten bulbs that most of us still have in our homes.

I shot a few test frames and settled on a manual white balance setting using the strongest color correction that my Nikon D2H is capable of: tungsten, with a "+3" set via the front control wheel. The camera was pushing the color as far toward blue as it can, yet the picture is still overly yellow:

JPG FILE, NO WORKUP

The lighting looks really yellow to the human eye and not just to the camera, but I wanted to remove more of the yellow. This is the kind of situation is where it's really helpful to shoot in the "RAW plus JPG" mode, which is what I usually do.

So when I sat down with the laptop a few minutes later I opened the raw file and "corrected" the color by completely removing the excessive yellow. Perhaps I overdid it-- there's no excessive yellow:

RAW FILE RENDERED TO REMOVE YELLOW, NO WORKUP

I'm amazed that I was able to remove so much of the yellow and get this much blue into the shot. How powerful the raw rendering processor is! (Raw files can't simply be opened like a jpg-- they must be "rendered" by a computer application such as the one in PhotoShop CS3.) Those sodium vapor lights have almost no blue light at all, yet this version looks almost like daylight color.

The only obvious color error is that the Pike Place sign is now magenta instead of red, which could easily be changed with a rough selection and using the hue/saturation tool to move the magentas to red.

Since I was on deadline, I didn't have a chance to tweak or re-do the rendering. I just shipped the photo back to the TNT like this.

But one doesn't have to shoot raw files to achieve strong color-correction. One can also correct the jpg in Photoshop. How well? I wondered.

Below are two more versions. First is the raw file with only the slightest workup: the shadows were pushed away from blue slightly toward yellow. Following is the jpg file with color correction done using a variety of tools: levels, hue, and saturation. In both cases I made no selections, making all changes to the whole frame.

RAW FILE RENDERED TO REMOVE YELLOW, MODEST WORKUP

JPG FILE, HEAVY WORKUP TO REMOVE EXCESS YELLOW

As you can see, they aren't very different. The color in the raw file is generally richer, especially the skin tones in the nearby faces as you can see in the side by side below:

DETAIL FROM RAW FILE ON LEFT, DETAIL FROM HEAVILY WORKED UP JPG ON RIGHT

Perhaps the skin color is oversaturated (too vivid) in the raw version, but that would be easy to fix, unlike the splotchy color in the jpg. And look at the hair: smooth tones in the raw version, funkiness in the jpg, probably due to the camera's sharpening, which is only done manually with raw files, either during rendering and/or later in the workup.

As I mentioned above, I probably "overcorrected" the color in this particular raw file, but in this case with strongly colored lighting, raw files are a lot easier to work with.

Hooray for "RAW+JPG"!