Nokon D60 users

[Junz]

Gents,

Im at the point off throwing my camera in the bin, I cannot take any decent pics of my tank with it,all other pictures seem to be ok.

Specifically when i take pics of my tank it tends to look blue and doesn't show the correct colors of my corals.

Iv tried different settings and played for hours with it but no luck

anyone can help me get some decent pics please....
Il post some pics now to show you what i mean

Thanks
Janade

 

[Junz]

Original Photo
as you can see its really blue

V2
Some basic touches to bring out the color

V3
Used Photoshop and the difference to me is quiet nice

please let me know your thoughts

 

[pyroboy1der]

You need to look at your White balance.
White balance essentially means what color temperature is white in your photograph. So if you're using 6,500K T5 for your tank you want your white balance to be set as close to 6,500K as you can get so that the colors look as natural as you can.
On higher end cameras there is an option to manually set a color temp but unfortunately the D60 does not have that. Fortunately the Manual from the D60 has rough equivalent temps for the different W/B Presets. They're on page 104 of the English manual or page 116 of the PDF Here http://www.nikonusa.com/pdf/manuals/dslr/D60_en.pdf.

It looks like the D60 only goes up to color temp 8,000k so if your lighting is a higher color temp than that you'll have to continue to Photoshop to get the color to come out right.

(I don't actually have a D60 but I do currently shoot with a D80 and a D7000 and the principle is the same no matter what the camera.)

 

[qfrisco]

Hi - great looking pics so far! Don't give up! That's a great camera you have, and it's not hard to get some even better pics!

It's normally pretty tricky to get accurate color of our tanks, because our lights operate at a color temperature that is tough for the camera to "read" accurately, fooling its white balance feature.

The easiest thing to do is to set your White Balance to "Cloudy". On the D60, use the Quick Settings button (bottom button on the left) and select "Cloudy" under "WB". This will give a decent color rendition.

But to get the best color, my first recommendation is to shoot in RAW (instead of JPG) format. Shooting in RAW allows you to bypass all the processing that the camera does to the picture right after you take it. This includes bypassing the camera's white balance detection, which is usually wrong anyway (when taking pics of our tanks). On the D60, press the Quick Settings button (bottom button on left), then under "Qual" select "RAW".

Try that out and see if that works better for you!