How to remove the colour cast on the Lee Big Stopper or Hitech Pro Stop filters

I have had a few emails recently from people who have just bought either the Lee Big Stopper or Hitech Pro Stop asking how do I remove a colour cast from using these filters.

So I have decided to write this short tutorial. This will be short because it is quite easy to correct as long as you are shooting in RAW.

You are shooting in RAW, right?  These filters give out a blue cast and if you use jpeg mode on these you are just making things difficult for yourself.

There are only really a couple of steps.  First of all open the file in Camera RAW.  Click on the White Balance Tool (3rd from the left on the top row in Camera RAW) and then select an area of about mid grey.  I usually find that clouds work well for this.  The example image below used the cloud as a sample point for the white balance.  This removed the colour cast and brought most of the colours back into line.  If the first point you sample doesn’t give you good results then keep clicking on different points until you get a good result.

This will get you very close to the correct white balance.  If not you can use the targeted adjustment tool to change the hue/saturation and lightness of the colours too.  In this image, I felt the cliff was a bit too red.  I selected the Targeted Adjustment Tool (5th from left in Camera RAW) and then going to the HSL/greyscale pane on the lefthandside.  I selected Saturation and then placed the tool over the area I wanted to change.  A hold in of the mouse button and a drag to the left/right decreases/increases the saturation.  I ended up with -10% red, -24% orange.  This is a global adjustment, so if I wanted to just change the cliff area and nothing else then I would have went into photoshop and did the same thing but masking off the areas I didn’t want to change.

This is the image straight out of the camera with the camera’s auto white balance selected.

This is the finished image with the camera RAW adjustments applied and then some sharpening and my usual border/ frame added.

To my reckoning this works for about 90% of my long exposures.  Some others need a bit more work with photoshop to remove casts but for the most part this will get you close to a finished image.