Anybody get these oversaturated highlights and colour tones?

I've been photographing some jazz performances under artificial lighting. I don't recall getting these oversaturated highlights and saturated colour tones from my Leica. I know it's due to the stage lighting but this is insanely oversaturated to the point of clipping.

All photos below are unprocessed.

These shots are from the Canon 7D DSLR:

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And these were from the Sony A7, the skin tones are completely ruined:

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That's pretty crazy. Your blue channel is maxed out. You may note that all the colors aren't oversaturated, it's just the blue that appears that way. I think the best way to handle this without affecting everything else is to adjust "levels" for blue channel only.
 
That's pretty crazy. Your blue channel is maxed out. You may note that all the colors aren't oversaturated, it's just the blue that appears that way. I think the best way to handle this without affecting everything else is to adjust "levels" for blue channel only.

Doesn't work very well when I do that. It does not get rid of the colour and even when I max out the desaturation, there's still the mega-overclipped blue highlight outline in the photo.
 
Doesn't work very well when I do that. It does not get rid of the colour and even when I max out the desaturation, there's still the mega-overclipped blue highlight outline in the photo.

I remember I had this thing happen when shooting a red flower. The red channel was just way overexposed (which seemed counterintuitive to me at first). I'm not talking about turning down the saturation in the blue channel. The blue channel is just "overexposed" (I think). Can you just adjust the "exposure" for the blue channel? I forget the right terminology to use in Lightroom, but saturation is not the problem (I don't think).
 
hm... I didn't think about adjusting the exposure, I've only messed about with the saturation. I shall try that (after I've had a sleep... very tired).

What I've been doing to try to counter the more manageable skin colour tones is to counter the reds with green tint. I sometimes have to apply several layers of maxed out green tint to bring the skin tones back to manageable levels.
 
Here's a few links that may help explain it better than I can. But after I read through them all, I had a better understanding of what was going on (even if I can't explain it properly). It may help you in your tweaking.

Understanding Digital Camera Histograms: Luminosity and Color

Channel Clipping - recovering a blown out R/G/B channel - Bob Atkins Photography

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/restore-clipped.shtml

Hopefully between these articles and a good night's sleep, you can shake those blues.
 
Here's a few links that may help explain it better than I can. But after I read through them all, I had a better understanding of what was going on (even if I can't explain it properly). It may help you in your tweaking.

Thanks for those articles, I will get down to reading them when I wake up. I didn't even think to do a search!


Hopefully between these articles and a good night's sleep, you can shake those blues.

hrdy hrdy hrrrrrrr
 
Yes, just looks like overexposed blue channel to me also. I've shot a few concerts and events for our church with blue and red stage lights and it's part of the 'fun' of trying to juggle a workable exposure, white balance and skin tones. :D

Sometimes I've had no choice but to lose highlights blowing out the blue or red channel, really just depends on the range of tones.
 
Here's a few links that may help explain it better than I can. But after I read through them all, I had a better understanding of what was going on (even if I can't explain it properly). It may help you in your tweaking.

Understanding Digital Camera Histograms: Luminosity and Color

Channel Clipping - recovering a blown out R/G/B channel - Bob Atkins Photography

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/restore-clipped.shtml

Hopefully between these articles and a good night's sleep, you can shake those blues.

Reading these articles now, not finished yet.. but I'm not exposing to the right though, as suggested by these articles. In fact I tend to expose to the left to underexpose.
 
James, instead of looking at the regular histogram (because your exposure IS fine), you need to look at a separate histogram for the blue channel. I think that will show you what is going on.

In that article that uses the red motorcycle image, it's a similar thing, but with the red channel. The overall image is properly exposed, but the red channel is a bit blown out. Your images (I think) are the same, but with the blue channel blown out.
 
What do you mean you lose highlights? Do you mean you intentionally allow it to clip?

Right, sometimes you have no choice but to clip some of the (color) highlights. In principle it's the same as if you had a hot spotlight on one part of the scene, except that it's specific to a color channel. So your exposure is fine, as Luke said, but you probably have a blown out blue channel.

I first encountered this phenomenon shooting photos of red flowers, where the overall exposure would seem ok but the flower would turn to mush because the red channel was over-exposed/saturated. The only way to deal with it that I'm aware of is basically to lower your exposure down (underexpose the image, basically) and then adjust it back up in post so you don't clip the red channel - or blue channel in your case.
 
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