Shooting under all blue leds

akitareefer

New member
As the title says I'm trying to take some all blue led photos of a pink acan. No matter what white balance I try, the pink is absolutely washed out. Anyone out there have any tips? I usually only take photos under t5, MH, and vho. All photos of green things and red rock nems come out fine (it feels like I'm cheating).

Anyone out there capturing pink under leds and what settings are you using? Feel free to post some super blue led photos.

As for camera I'm using an Olympus e-410 and a 35mm 1:3.5 macro. The LEDs are diy royal blue, UV and white. I see people taking what looks like full blue led photos, I'd like to do the same.
 
Are you shooting raw or jpeg? Raw is going to offer you a couple of benefits (assuming that camera has the option to save files in raw format). First, the larger bit density is going to allow you a greater range in both colors and luminance. Second, it's going to allow much greater ability in adjusting your white balance after the fact. . .which is really your best bet when shooting under blue light. Unfortunately, the camera's white balance settings just aren't going to be very good at faithfully reproducing shots under such abnormal lighting conditions. So my suggestion there would be to shoot raw using any white balance setting other than auto and adjust to your liking in Lightroom, Photoshop, etc.

The second issue comes in the extreme colors you're dealing with, where you'll have really high luminance in one color channel (sounds like the red channel in your case) and really low in another. You may have to underexpose the overall picture slightly to keep individual channels from getting clipped. If your camera will display a color histogram, that's the best place to check to ensure you're not clipping one of your color channels. Once again, if you're shooting in raw, you'll have more capability to recover clipped channels in post as well as adjust luminance for specific color channels in post.

If you can't capture in raw format, and the auto white balance setting isn't working, you should have an ability to set a custom white balance. Under blue LEDs, that could still be hit or miss, but you could give it a shot. You'll have to consult your user manual for the specifics on setting a custom white balance, but in general, take either a waterproof white balance card or something like a white 5g bucket lid, position it in the tank at about a 45 degree angle and use that to set your custom white balance.

Chances are I mentioned something you're not familiar with or didn't do a good job explaining it, so if any part of this (or all of it) doesn't make sense to you, let me know, and I'll try to explain it better.
 
I am shooting in raw. I will have to read my manual to see if I can do a custom light balance. I usually adjust it on my own between 7800 and 10000 for MH and t5 lighting. I haven't tried editing the photos yet because they looked so washed out in blue when I see them on my camera screen. I might also try dimming the whites really low and see how the pictures turn out. Thank you for your input. I'll post if I get any good pictures.
 
Give editing the photos a shot. With the lights we use in our tanks, even the 10K manual white balance setting generally isn't enough. Since you're working in raw, adjusting the white balance after the fact has no negative effect on your image quality. I'm not sure what editing program you're using, but there should be a set of white adjustment bars, one controlling the color temperature and one controlling the tint. Start dragging the color temp slider towards the red end of the spectrum and see how things look. The other option you have is to select a white reference point in your picture, and the software will automatically adjust your white balance (so you won't need to set a custom white balance in the camera beforehand). Just take a picture of a white balance card or something else white and waterproof (like a 5g bucket lid). In your editing software, there's probably something that looks like an eye dropper. If you click on the white object with the eye dropper, it should automatically adjust your white balance to the correct levels. There's one catch, though. Technically correct white balance doesn't always look quite the way our minds interpret the image, so you may still need to tweek the white balance toolbars to get it to look "right".
 
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