How to easily spot color cast in aperture

Hi,
I am having difficulties to properly spot/analyze a color cast in my (scanned from color negatives) images. There is no neutral grey or white present and I'd like to get a handle on correcting this color cast without just trial and error (and making things worse)
Any hints or ideas? Pointing me to a resource on the web to find out how?
(Spotting and correcting the color cast in my scanning software (Silverfast Ai) didn'd work as well)
Thanks a bunch,
Rolf

Hi Rolf -- you're question is not really answerable. Color is almost entirely subjective -- we color our world in our brains, and then we make machines to mimic this (digicam sensors don't record color -- they record luminance as filtered through known colored gels). Your question presumes an objective standard of color correctness. That does not exist.
Nevertheless, you can at least maximize your ability to get the colors as close to "right" as you can. For that you need a color-calibrated workflow, from input (scanner) to output (whatever). There is much information on this on the Web. For Aperture, you'll want a hardware photospectrometer to calibrate your monitor(s) and whatever paper you print on (if you print). I use a Color Munki Photo, and recommend it or something similar. (X-Rite has recently announced a revamped product line.) X-Rite also makes a calibration tool called a Passport. This has several colors and shades of gray of known hues. In use, you make an exposure of these colored squares, and then use them to set the white balance. You might be able to something similar with a scanner. (I don't use one, and don't know anything about scanner calibration.)
HTH. Sorry not to know more.

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Dropbox - Example of magenta color cast-001.jpg
If the link works, you'll see what I mean: the dark areas are purple, not black as they should be. This was taken at the dress rehearsal for a play at ISO 3200, about the lowest ISO that I could get away with. The purple cast seems more pronounced along the edges of the photo.
I've read a bit about "amp glow"; is that what I'm seeing here? If it is, what can I do about it? Turning the camera off and on again and again to try to cool the sensor and the nearby electronics isn't much of an option.
And whether it's "amp glow" or something else, is there a good way to deal with it in Lightroom? I've had some success with reducing the purple saturation (and sometimes the purple luminance as well) in the "HSL" panel, but that becomes a problem if there are important elements in the photo which are SUPPOSED to be purple.
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dorffersmatt wrote:
Interestingly, my e-mail says there was another post about how to reduce the purple cast with proper in-camera settings, but now that post seems to have been deleted (by the poster? by somebody at Adobe?)
The poster (Drugstore) may have deleted the post after reading further because it may not have been relevant......just a guess. If you're shooting raw format the in-camera settings such as white balance are not applied to the image file, but they are for JPEGs. The suggestions I provided are applicable to both JPEG and raw image files, but you'll get the best results using raw format.
dorffersmatt wrote:
1) You said that you sometimes see the purple cast with your D4 and D810 if the white balance isn't set properly. What would you consider a proper white balance setting for a situation such as this one? It was the dress rehearsal for a play, with constantly shifting lighting. I just left the white balance on "Auto"; how would you have approached the situation?
Again, this only applies to JPEG format image files. For raw image files the WB EXIF data is read and set accordingly inside LR. For JPEGs the image data has the (incorrect?) WB applied in-camera, which compromises the dynamic range of the JPEG 8-bit/color data. Raw files are 16 bit/color.
dorffersmatt wrote:
2) You said that you also sometimes see it if "you activate the lens correction in LR while in raw mode and exposure is too low." Could you elaborate on that? Do you mean that I shouldn't use "Enable profile corrections" in the "Lens Corrections" panel?
I'm guessing this refers to what you call "amp glow" (amplifier glow). It usually appears as a higher exposure level around the edge of the image and may be confined to one area (top, bottom, sides). By turning off Lens Profile corrections ( "Enable profile corrections") Vignetting correction is not applied, which reduces the exposure level in the corners and frame edges. Some cameras automatically apply distortion and/or vignetting correction in-camera when shooting in JPEG format. Again, this is just another reason why you want to use raw format to get the best results inside LR.

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iMac G5 Mac OS X (10.4.3)

Good luck! The white point tool is pretty much broken.

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Please help me to write javascript code.
thanks,
mon

'unusedSwatches' -- sure. Removing these will leave just the used ones (something like that was asked a while ago). But it seems the OP wants to know where the remaining ones are in use.
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When saving in Illustrator, I've been receiving the error:
"When spot colors are used with transparency, changing them to process colors outside of illustrator can generate unexpected results."
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Thanks Monika and John. I've been working in Spot colors simply because my client has limited my palette for the screen printing we've been doing on ceramics in the past. Now we want this book to match the colors on the ceramics. But if Pantone bridge back to CMYK would work, I'll do it. I have been saving to PDF by making a combined pdf directly from the .ai folder. My links are all embedded.
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1 - yes, you can do this with Preflight in Acrobat Pro, but it's not on the default set of fixups.
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Choose the Color category in the upper right
Choose 'Convert to spot color' in the upper left
Define the source parameters in the main panel (in your case, CMYK%, 0-0-0-100 with tolerance 0)
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http://www.braintrove.com/article/58
Greg Collins
Microsoft MVP
Visit Braintrove at http://www.braintrove.com

None taken. I am unfamiliar with ACR and would love to see (compare) what it
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The results I achieved in the article took only a few minutes to
complete--though as I mention below, it took more than a few minutes to get
to the point where I could do it in a few minutes.
I happened across a web site one day discussing the techniques in Margulis'
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very enlightening and have seen incredible results using the techniques he
describes as applied to my various images. I've also ready his Professional
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Ultimately the tools and techniques used are irrelevant if you get the
results you want... but if you find one that works faster, easier or better,
then certainly you should employ it.
I have no problem working in RGB, CMYK or LAB and find benefits from each.
The particular sample image I used in the article was one that I've spent
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Greg Collins
Microsoft MVP
Visit Braintrove at http://www.braintrove.com

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Regards,
Prabudass E.

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I exported to pdf and the spot colors converted to cymk. Shucks! How do I stop that?
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What am I doing wrong?
I was going to attach the small test file but the system did allow. Hope my description is enough to render a solution.
-Steve

The only thing you're doing wrong is using FH's PDF export. It creates PDF files that are adequate for viewing online or printing to composite inkjet printers, but it doesn't support spot colors.
There are many more reasons why you shouldn't use FH's PDF export for print work. See this technote for limitations of PDF export.
http://go.adobe.com/kb/ts_tn_13496_en-us
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You cannot change the color of the linked logo in ID. You'll need to open the logo in the appropriate editor and make a new spot color version, then link that.

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If i go to ink manager and convert it to process it will still be in the graphic. I want to be able to export a pdf version of my brochure. 1 version for the printer that would have the spot uv. I can do this no problem. The other version would be for the web. I do not want the uv color showing up over all my graphics. I just want the cmyk to show through. To create my spot color i read a bunch of tutirals on the web they all had me doing it rhough a channel. I can see now how having it as a layer would help my sitation if I had dont that to start. At this time I would have to start over to do it that way. There must be a way from indesign or acrobat to turn off a plate/color and export or save a version without it.

How to spot color in a character style?

Dear all,
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Billy

Hi
Sorry that I didn't make myself understood. Below are the details for your information:
We're running the XML-first workflow under InDesign CS4. When importing the XML file (with many paragraph/character styles [pstyle & cstyle]) into the pre-defined InDesign template, we find difficulties in recognizing whether there are any new paragraph/character styles that have not been defined in the existing InDesign template. It would be great if the non-defined styles could be shown in a special (spot) color, or placed into a new group. Would you please check the feasibility and advise us?
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mozilla.cfg
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pref("privacy.sanitize.sanitizeOnShutdown", true);
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channel-prefs.js
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How to correct for dual color casts?

It seems that I have a slight warm color cast from the top of my image down and a slight cool color cast from the bottom of my image up. The center area is color neutral. How to I correct for these color casts?
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I'm thinking I need something like a gradient "photo filter" for Photoshop?
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J

I just answered my own question: I changed the color of the Dodge Tool to pale Red and took out the cool cast and now I'm going to change the color to a cool color and take out the warm cast.
Sorry.
J

How to easily spot color cast in aperture

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