Nashville, and Tennessee as a whole is very green…..and when shooting outdoor portraits, color spill, or bleed, is something outdoor portrait photographers and wedding photographers know all about. Color spill, or bleed, is when elements or objects, colors around the subject reflect light and bleed into the color of the photo itself. This also happens indoors, from wall and carpet colors bleeding into the subject area, but today we will stick to the outdoor realm of this. Whether utilizing natural light or flash, or studio lighting outdoors, light reflects off foliage and grass, that will cause some green cast to enter the subject area. In terms of color management, magenta is the opposite of green. Therefore, there are different ways to deal with this.

You can do a custom white balance, which will neutralize the spill…..assuming the area you are shooting in and it’s light stays the same…..if you are mobile, like shooting candids at a wedding reception, conditions will change. Or if your camera has white balance compensation, you can bump up magenta a tad, if you know you will get green spill…..you can look at your RGB histogram and tell. Expodisc is another product which neutralizes mixed light temperatures and sources, as well as sources of color spill, but re reading willbe necessary with changing conditions. I however do not have one. I will show an example, before and after. I do believe in getting things as right as possible in camera, to reduce Photoshop time…..I get paid to shoot, not fix careless lazy mistakes. I was under a tent, white overhead ceiling and white table cloths in spots…..but grass floor. So there would be some color spill in spots. Therefore making custom white balance not a perfect solution….I set my kelvin white balance to 5200 and shot in RAW for easier repair if needed…..though a very slight tweak in color balance also works since it wasn’t far gone. I used a flash, and a lightsphere and the light bounced off the ceiling, and off the floor of course, which was grass……which did cause some green spill. As seen here.

And a slight tweak of magenta in camera RAW neutralized his skin tone as seen here. Easy fix, but I made an effort to get it close to start with, which reduced my desk time.