I must admit I have a bit of an issue. Whenever I start working with Photoshop (and sometimes Illustrator too, depending on what I’m working on) I lose track of time… I’m still not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing!

I was watching a film earlier, Chalet Girl, which is the typical Cinderella story. In this case, a girl who used to be a great skateboarder, but not anymore for some reason… So, this girl lives with her dad and they’re poor, and by some weird luck thing that happens in films, she gets to work in the Alps as a chalet girl, and learns how to snowboard, and becomes a super snowboarder. She enters a competition, struggles, meets her prince, etc, etc. I still don’t understand why she didn’t try to enter a skateboarding competition or something like that, but OK, whatever.

Thing is, the film was silly, but it switched on my winter mode (I’m lying, it’s been on for a while now!) and I started daydreaming about snowboarding and winter, and then I thought about Christmas.

Thinking about Christmas, I thought I should definitely start working on all the photos I had taken last Sunday, of the Pinterest fail (I believe I haven’t shared what it was with all of you yet) and the cake that I baked. I started with the fail.

Now, all my photos tend to have some reddish cast on them. I guess it’s because of a wrong white balance, but it’s not just that, the reds appear overly saturated, too bright and strong. I blame it on my Nikon, but I should probably blame it on my skills. Anyway, it annoys me, especially because my cake moulds are red, bright red, so that doesn’t help the overall colour of the photograph.

I started working on the contrast and stuff like that, not touching the photos much, unless there was an offensive wrong balance or similar, and then I got annoyed at an apple. A red apple. A red apple that appeared bright and saturated in all the photos, and that it was throwing off the general look and feel of the whole image. I got the white alright (or so I thought), I got all the shadows, the contrast, and dammit, that surely looked white. Why does that apple look almost radioactive? Lowering the saturation and the usual tricks only messed up with the colour, bringing it to almost black and white (while the red still remained), or messed up with the gamma and similar stuff.

Lately, my favourite place to check out Photoshop tutorials is a website called Phlearn. The guy (Aaron Nace) does really approachable video tutorials, and he’s funny and relatable. I often find myself watching tutorial after tutorial, even if I have no clue what he’s talking about, and just trying out stuff. I’ve learn about frequency separation, about how to change colours, and about colour cast, amongst many other things. I’ve probably learnt all of those the wrong way anyway, but hey, not his fault and probably mine for just trying out the next tutorial without getting a firm grasp of what I had just learnt first.

So I decided that I would watch their colour cast tutorial again, and try it on my image, see what happened, as well as look into the saturation, white balance and, well, pretty much everything about the photo. Here is the tutorial.

You can see the photo I worked on below (of course, I am aware it isn’t perfect yet).

I basically spent the last hour playing around with the photos, while watching the film (I’m aware by the time I post this, it’ll have been even longer!) and in the end, the post I wanted to publish is not ready yet, the one about the Pinterest fail. On one hand, it’s bad news, because I am still teasing you about that post but not showing you anything yet. On the other hand, it’s good news because it means that when I finally publish it, with some luck, the photos will actually look good. A girl can dream, don’t you think?

So I guess this is me saying hey, I haven’t forgotten or disappear, I’m just a bit of a numpty sometimes when taking photos, which makes me take longer in post production… I’m working on it, coming soon to a device of your choice!, and pretty much apologise for the delay.

If you’re a photographer, how do you deal with nasty colour cast in your photographs? Are there any tutorials/video channels you follow almost religiously?

If you’re not a photographer (or also if you are, why not?), do you have any hobbies that make you lose track of time? Those that you only realise it’s time to go to sleep because your eyes are almost closed and you’re having trouble focusing…

I would love to know!