Shooting my F Panel -Dealing with the light

Images for my panel were taken on fifteen different station platforms at ten different stations of the Victoria Line, from Pimlico to Seven Sisters. Not all stations made it into the final cut but I processed over forty images for consideration and had to deal with a range of lighting issue:

• Lighting, station to station, was not the same; the position of the open doorways relative to the platform light sources varied. Some station platforms were quite dark, others much brighter. Some station lights lit the top of the trains, others did not.
• Lighting inside the trains was always the same from train to train, as you would expect; however the people inside the train had a big impact on the lighting levels; light reflected off clothing changed the perceived colour of the interior.
• Train interior light sources are very bright and not all the same colour temperature. The floor lights next to the doors (when the doors open) are very intense and have a blue cast.
• People standing on the platform near the doors blocked platform light, which made a measurable difference to the brightness immediately inside the doorways.

The impact of all this was three-fold:

• on the lighting in the doorway area; the overall brightess, colour of the grey/cream interiors
• on the colour and the uniformity of brightness of the exterior of the red doors;
• sometimes creating unwanted reflections on the doors and door windows.

Harmonising the colour and brightness from image to image was simplified by processing the red doors as separate images from the doorway interiors. They were brought back together at the end of the processing.

To simplify the explanation of what was quite a complicated task requiring multiple iterations, the interior doorway images were all adjusted to common RGB values based on an empty train. One of the important target areas for adjustment was the grey doors which were very susceptible to looking “off colour”. However allowance had to be made for reflected colour from passenger clothing, so it was important to choose the right part of the door for colour sampling. Also the expanses of cream around the doorways were a good indicator. I used lightroom for this task; RGB values as % are displayed below the histogram in the develop module, based on the location of the cursor.

Achieving a uniform colour appearance from image to image turned out to be much more complicated than I had imagined at the onset, somewhat subjective, with no such thing as “perfect”. Getting it looking right was an essential step to producing acceptable finished images. A big part of that was making sure that images that would be next to each other in the panel were closely matched.

This is the third post in the series on my F panel. You can read the first here. I will have more to say about processing the doors and windows in another post.