Need tips on neutral lighting in colored spaces

novastrider

Hi everyone, I have a question about how to create good lighting in colored rooms.

So normal neutral (white, slight yellow in evening, slight blue in day) lighting on characters in most situations isn't much of a problem. Only sometimes I design strongly colorful rooms, with for example pink wallpaper or green carpets, which is when I run into trouble with my lights, since they tend to overpower my HDRI maps neutral lights and heavily bleed their pinks and greens onto the characters. I can fight it a little bit by changing the white balance option, but that doesnt always work, especially when there's a lot of different colors in the environment (white balancing out pink doesnt remove the green for example). Or in an ocean environment I can't really remove the blue, because the water still needs to remain deeply blue. The renderer is just doing whats correct for real life, in a blue environment everyone lights blue, but I'm trying to highlight my characters a bit more neutral of course for art.

The solution probably lies with adding neutral lights around the character, but Im having trouble doing that subtly. They tend to blow out a bit too strong or I loose all the nice shadows from the environment. So I'm open for any and all tips from people how they create their lighting in heavily colored spaces!

Question is inspired by this example image btw, just wondering how they might've kept this creature so nicely neutral colored despite the environment being a heavy ocean blue:

ShortlegDoggo

I could be doing it wrong, but to achieve a look like that, I usually render the character separately with dome/ground off (transparent background), then I render the background, and I drop the character on top of the background in Photoshop (and do a little bit of tweaking sometimes).