reducing the blue in photos

[marke]

In taking pictures with my nikon d80 and a tokina 50?-300 macro lens. I am finding that my pictures are coming out to blue. Maybe due to 15k 400wt mhalides. I am looking for suggestions on how to reduce the blue in photos without photoshop? Maybe its a white balance thing?

 

[Blazer88]

Adjust your white balance to take out the blue, easy enough. I shoot with my WB set to 10K and then do any final adjustment in lightroom.

 

[Tremont]

Use RAW and set the white balance appropriately when you import from RAW. Your camera can't detect/set your halide light temperature.

-Tre

 

[marke]

I am using raw. And its clear its a white bal issue. How do you set the white bal at 10k? I thought you need to shoot a white object (maybe even in the tank) to set the white bal.

 

[Blazer88]

Go through your instruction manual and see if you can set a manual WB. The highest my camera goes up to is 10K which comes pretty close. Shooting RAW and adjusting it in post-processing is the best way though.

 

[truthdesigns]

tagging along here!

 

[surge19us]

On my D90 you hold the WB button on the back and rotate the main wheel until it says 10000k in the wb box on the control panel.

 

[Tremont]

The point is, you shouldn't be setting the white balance on your camera at all, as it is irrelevant. You should be setting the color temperature when you import from RAW. For example, if you shoot in raw, it just set's what it thinks is the white balance temperature to a variable, and doesn't actually include any of that information in your image data. When you do the raw conversion, if you don't explicitly set the white balance, it will use the value that your camera recorded to set the white balance on the image during the conversion. You should set it explicitly to your light temperature (or tweak it using your light as a baseline, as typically the actual temperature will be a bit off from your 14k or 20k or whatever that your light is rated at).

-Tre

 

[surge19us]

Actually if I set WB on auto and take a series of pics under my
20k radiums it is difficult to tell what pics are best that I want to post process because they are so blue. If I set WB to 10000k and shoot a series and import the RAW files I can quickly evaluate my best shot or two in library and move to post process them. Then the WB in lightroom is very close to correct and only needs a minor tweak. I am fairly new at this and may be wrong here but it is a small adjustment that saves time later.

 

[Tremont]

That's a good point. Setting it to the high end will allow you to preview your pictures with closer to the actual WB. I'm prolly the only person who actually shoots jpeg on purpose on these forums, and I usually set it up to 10k if I am using actinic or my aquarium lights (usually I use LED arrays used for video lighting which use a lower color temperature). This is close enough that I can use the shots and no one notices, but my WB is actually very off from reality in many cases.

My short film is almoooooost done, so I should be able to show off the time lapse stuff I've been working on very soon (beginning of June)..I think people will understand why I do the f'd up things with white balance that I talk about on here (it let's me shoot a ton of time lapse footage without bogging down my processing pipeline and without paying $1k for after effects).

-Tre

 

[kilroy217]

Does the white balance value in Lightroom correspond to the K value of the lights? In other words, when I'm correcting white balance in lightroom, should I set it to 18,000 since I'm using 18,000K bulbs?

Also, should the white balance be the same for every shot in a series? In other words, can we batch edit for white balance?

Sorry to hijack...

 

[TitusvileSurfer]

I can't wait to see this movie of yours. You've been hinting at it for some time now!