Colour correcting HDRi skies

Photo by Brigida Gonzalez also on my scrapbook

Photo by Brigida Gonzalez also on my scrapbook

I quite often reference images I see on the internet when I am interested in achieving a particular mood or more often colour balance. This usually happens well into a project and quite often by accident rather than by design, but that's the subject of another, future post..

I liked the colour of the sky in the above photo, especially in combination with the pale yellow interior lighting. From looking through my HDR sky collection, I went for 0902 which was pretty close but not the right colour:

match01.jpg

I'm hoping chaosgroup will eventually grant my wish of adding some colour temp/tint controls to the vrayHDRi map, but in the meantime you can adjust the colour using the color map in the output roll up. I simply took some red out of the sky by unchecking G and B and dragging down the red curve.

output.JPG

Which results in a much closer match:

match02.jpg

You might be able to achieve the same thing with either the native max color correction map or colorcorrect but I think this is a neater solution. You could also colour correct the camera, but then you would have to compensate the temp of all of your lights as well.

Work-in-progress: a new project done in collaboration with Henry Goss for Ström Architects.

Work-in-progress: a new project done in collaboration with Henry Goss for Ström Architects.