Why do red or blue LED stage lights make concert photos look soft or blown out?
Asked 2/4/2016
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2 answers
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I’m shooting concerts in a small venue with basic LED stage lighting, often in very strong red or blue light. When that happens, my photos can look fuzzy or out of focus even though focus seems correct. The same camera settings may look fine under green light.
I shoot manually, so this isn’t an aperture-priority metering issue. Is this mainly caused by the lighting itself? Should I underexpose to protect the color channel, or is there any practical way to handle it besides waiting for better light?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
10y ago
2 Answers
14
The general fuzziness and lack of detail in these photos is mostly due to being lit primarily by one strong color.
Your camera's sensor has what is called a Bayer color filter array on it which allows it to record only one primary color per sensor element. In your camera or raw processing software, the single-color-per-pixel sensor data is combined to produce a full-color image.
Important to your situation is the fact that for each set of four sensor elements, two are green-sensitive, one is red-sensitive, and one is blue-sensitive.
Knowing that, it's easy to see that when your subject is lit only by strong red light, you're only recording image data with 1/4 of the sensor elements on your sensor. The remaining 3/4 of the data has to be interpolated and most interpolation algorithms aren't going to do well without any green- or blue-channel information. That results in a blurry image lacking in fine detail.
Unfortunately there's no good way around this with traditional color-filter-array sensors. A Foveon sensor would excel in situations like this, as all its sensor elements are sensitive to all colors. Color film would also not suffer this problem.
It's also worth noting that this is a very good reason not to use color contrast filters (intended for black-and-white film) on a digital camera.
Originally by user25990. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user25990
10y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
Yes—this is mostly a lighting/sensor issue, not necessarily missed focus. Under very strong red or blue LED light, most of the scene is recorded through only one color channel. On a Bayer sensor, that means only part of the sensor is capturing strong detail, while the rest must be interpolated, which makes the image look softer and less detailed.
A second problem is channel clipping: the red or blue channel can blow out even when the overall brightness doesn’t look overexposed. That can also cause blooming and ugly highlights.
What to do:
- Expose for the brightest color channel, not just the overall histogram.
- If your camera supports it, use separate RGB histograms to see when red or blue is clipping.
- Slight underexposure can help preserve the blown channel, but if the light is extremely monochromatic, image quality may still suffer.
- Shoot RAW for maximum recovery.
- If needed, specialized RAW conversion without normal demosaicing can help analyze or partly recover clipped/bloomed areas, but results are limited.
So: yes, protect the dominant channel if possible—but sometimes harsh single-color LED lighting simply limits sharpness and detail.
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