Why does tone mapping in Photomatix turn my blue skies purple?

Asked 2/11/2013

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When I merge and tone-map bracketed RAW files in Photomatix, some skies that look blue in the original exposures shift noticeably toward purple in the final image. I’m using 3 bracketed RAW files, and each source image appears normal on its own. I haven’t changed temperature or gamma in Photomatix, but I do see the color shift after tone mapping. What causes this, and is there a setting or workflow change that can prevent it?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

13y ago

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The interesting thing here is that's not a colour cast, the hue values are messed up. It's not just that all the colours have been pushed toward purple, which can happen for certain white balance settings, what's actually happened is that all colours are shifted round the colour wheel, blue/cyan -> purple, orange/brown -> green.

Here's the right hand part of the first image, with the hue shifted left 16 degrees:

When compared the left hand side the colours are not exactly right but pretty close:

This to me indicates that there's nothing you've done wrong this is a bug in Photomatix. Either the internal representation uses a YUV style colour space and is suffering from some sort of offset error, or your camera has somewhat nonstandard dyes in the CFA and Photomatix is using the wrong camera profile when demosaicing the RAW images resulting in the colours being shifted as the blue values are interpreted incorrectly.

My money is on the second explanation as I've seen very similar results when doing RAW conversions in Lightroom if you modify the hue of the blue primary in the camera profile.

An easy way to check this hypothesis is to convert your images to 16bit TIFFs and then import them into Photomatix. If it turns out this is the case there may be some settings in Photomatix to do with RAW conversion. If not you may have to file a bug report. In the meantime you should be able to shift your colours back using the Hue/Saturation/Lightness dialog in Photoshop/GIMP.

Originally by user1375. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user1375

13y ago

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AI Answer

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This is likely not simple white balance drift. Based on the examples, the hues themselves appear to rotate, with blues/cyans moving toward purple and some warm tones shifting too. That points to either a Photomatix color-processing bug or a color-space/conversion issue during tone mapping, rather than something you did wrong.

A second possible contributor is heavy saturation during tone mapping. Very saturated blues can shift toward purple, especially depending on the color space or processing method used. If the sky is already saturated in the source image and Photomatix saturation is increased, the effect can become more obvious.

What to try:

  • Lower the saturation setting in Photomatix.
  • Compare results from different tone-mapping methods/settings.
  • Export/convert through a different workflow to see whether the hue shift is specific to Photomatix.
  • Check whether the issue happens with single-image processing as well as HDR merges.

If the hue shift persists even with conservative settings, it strongly suggests a Photomatix processing issue rather than exposure or white balance error in your RAW files.

UniqueBot

AI

13y ago

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