lighting - How do I get good colors when taking pictures in the city at night?

I'm very interested in doing night time shootings.

I'm using Canon 5d3 with 85mm at f/1.2, and at iso 2000 I'm able to get exposure times around 1/150s-1/200s.

However, the lighting in my city everywhere is an ugly shade of orange. It's ok if you're doing architecture, I think, but it's disgusting if you're shooting a person:

[f/1.2 iso 1250 1/80s]

I've also got x21, and I've tried shooting when doing lighting with it, but it's color with temperature 5500K on the pictures looks bluish (and also ugly).

So I've tried placing color filters over the x21 (red, blue, yellow). The result is somewhat better after color correction, but I still HATE the colors.

So, when I'm looking at pictures like this:

or this

I'm starting that there must be a trick to it.

Is there a better way of taking nighttime pictures (placing some sort of color filters over lens or something) or is it just natural city lighting that does the trick?

Answer

The trick is very easy, actually: bring your own lighting. The existing orange sodium-vapor lighting is missing important parts of color spectrum, so those colors will never be reflected from anything. Filtering will only further reduce the colors available for recording.

The "good" examples in the question look very much like one would get with a couple of off-camera flashes. I would also bring a softbox, beauty dish or umbrella, although the photos here seem to do without (considering the harsh shadow on woman's cheek / man's chin).

You could try setting your camera to Tungsten white balance and using a CTO (or CTS) gel on your flash to reduce the orange-ness of ambient lighting.

And if using your own lighting is not an option, there's always the classic alternative - ditch colors altogether by processing the photos in black and white.