Need help taking pictures under LEDs
- Thread starter dviper150
- Start date
Yep, that's pretty much it. I've never had much luck setting a custom white balance in-camera if the lighting is particularly blue (which in many people's tanks, it is). You can still use a waterproof white balance card (or a white lid from a 5g bucket works well too) for a reference point when you adjust your white balance in post processing. Even then, I almost always had to tweak the colors a bit to match the colors as I saw them (as opposed to what was "technically" correct).
Additionally, you can often times get a bit of color cast, as the tank is usually getting hit by different color temperatures (e.g. different bulbs, sunlight, ambient lighting, flash), so you may also have to fine tune the image by saturating and desaturating specific colors. This can be done quite easily in Photoshop (both CS and Elements) and Lightroom.
Any serious editing software is going to allow you to white balance. You can use Digital Photo Professional which is included with the camera, or you can use a third party program like Lightroom or Photoshop. It's generally going to be depected as two sliders. One slider controls the color temperature in degrees kelvin (you should be familiar with that measurement), and the other slider controls tint (green on one end to red on the other). Most programs will also have a tool that typically looks like an eyedropper that you can use to set a reference point. In other words, if you take a picture with a white balance card in the tank as suggested in my previous post, you can click on the white balance card with the eye dropper, and it will automatically adjust your white balance to the "correct" values.
dviper150
New member
I can't find the CD that came with my t3 so I guess I will be downloading one of the other programs. Thanks for the help. I am very photoshop and lightroom illiterate so I will just have to play with it I guess until I figure it out. I have been using picasso photo editor and I click on "I am feeling lucky" to fix whatever it can and it still doesn't seem right to me as I see it in person.
There's a free program called "Gimp" that a lot of people use. It's supposedly similar to Photoshop. I'm afraid I don't have a link, but I'm sure you could just Google it. You can also download free trials of Photoshop CS, Photoshop Elements or Lightroom from Adobe's website. CS is probably more than you need, but Elements or Lightroom may serve you well.
