Can I make a daylight photo look like it was shot under mercury or sodium vapor lighting?
Asked 3/23/2014
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I want to simulate the color rendering of line-spectrum light sources such as mercury vapor or high-pressure sodium lamps, starting from a photo taken in sunlight. This is more than a simple white-balance shift: those lamps change how different colors reproduce, so skin, walls, and other objects can shift differently under the same light.
Is there a practical way to emulate that look in post-processing?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
12y ago
2 Answers
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Yes, this is easy if you have a good ICC profile creation tool like i1Profiler and a color checker shot with your camera.
Step one: Create an ICC profile from the color checker data and use the current light source condition as the illuminant for your profiles white point..
Step 2: Create another profile with the color checker and the new illuminant. (e.g. mercury or sodium street lamp) Since it's not a standard Illuminant. You will have to plug in your trusty i1Pro2 or ColorMunki and go out and measure the light source you want your images to use.
Step 3: Now you have the record of the data for both illuminants built into profiles. Since what you want is for your images to have that casted look of a different white balance, so to do that you convert to the first profile with the correct white point. This should keep the colors the same on screen, then simply assign the new profile. That will show you what your image would look like under the new illuminant. If you like what you see then convert from that new profile back into a standard color space like Adobe98 or sRGB so you can share print or post it.
Originally by user21926. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user21926
12y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
Yes, but not accurately with white balance alone. The effect you want comes from the lamp’s spectral power distribution, which changes how different colors are rendered, not just the overall color cast.
A practical workflow is to use color profiling:
- Photograph a color checker with your camera under daylight.
- Create a profile for that daylight capture.
- Measure or characterize the target light source (for example, mercury vapor or sodium vapor) and create a second profile for that illuminant.
- Convert the image from the daylight profile toward the target-light profile.
This can be done with ICC/profile-creation tools and a measuring device such as a spectro/colorimeter, as described in the community answer.
The key limitation is that a line-spectrum source can remove or distort color information in ways a daylight capture may not fully reproduce, so the result is an approximation rather than a perfect physical simulation. But profiling is the most suitable route if you want something more realistic than a simple WB or tint adjustment.
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