This may be completely obvious to most of you, but I just discovered something extremely useful for me. (BTW, I am using a Canon 10d).

I was shooting a party, and was using "night mode" along with an external flash. This helps give some color and background fill to party/club scenes.

Most of the time that I do this, I can get away with it so long as any bright background lights aren't too close to the subject skin (otherwise there's a high chance of bleed by camera shake/movement), and I'm careful to brace my shooting. But it does rely on the subject being fairly still, though.

Anyway, to make a long story short, most of my photos were ruined by too much "dragging the shutter". I'll post a sample later. The lights and blurs intruded too much on the subjects. In-room illumination was typically tungsten lights.

BUT -- I discovered that this color light/blur was isolated almost completely in the red channel, with some spill into the green channel.

The blue channel showed almost none of the light blur, so I could recreate the photos from the blue channel and simply colorize into another hue.

Although I lose the color detail, I end up with sharp monochrome shots instead of ones that I would have normally tossed.

Perhaps this might be useful for others who originally thought an image was ruined.

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Cal.
www.pbase.com/chojan <- Portraits & Travel