Processing images from the blue / yellow polarizer

As written in my previous article  there is a strong colourcast over your images when you use your blue/yellow polarizer. In the beginning, this filter can be hard to get good images of, your white balance panics when it sees all these unnatural colours. There’s the colourcast of the filter, and then there are the unnaturally saturated reflections. Who could blame your white balance.

Now, the solution seems obvious, just turn to a preset of your camera, as the auto white balance is fooled. Well, there’s still the colourcast. Normally I just shoot RAW, and worry about correcting the colours later. The reason for doing so, is because it’s not about the colour temperature, but about the tint (green/magenta slider). And besides that, sometimes the colourcast can add something even more unrealistic to your images. 

When I open my images in Capture NX, I go to the colour correcting dialogue. First I will adjust the green/magenta slider. I will add somewhere between 2 to 5 (no idea what values to be used in lightroom/aperture) This will correct for the magenta-ish colourcast. After that, the image usually still has some issues, and I will decrease the colour temperature (make it colder) as usually there is still too much red in the image.

After this, the image will look comparable to what you actually saw through the filter, but it may take some tweaking for every image. However I think the results from this filter are more than worth it.