Taking aquaium picture under blue LEDs lighting

I have seen many aquarium photos and know right the way that he/she is running LEDs light especial Blue LEDs. In the most part, the color always turn out looking not what it should be and off. I too have this problem. So, any help from you experts out there is greatly appreciated.

My DSLR is canon 7D

Best :rollface:
 
I've had the same observation. Blue LED's look horrible on photo. The blues and purples appear as huge over-saturated blobs.
 
I've found the best way to do it is to use a gray card. I have the small WhiBal and it does the job. Basically you take a photo of the card in your tank in raw, take your tank photos in raw, then when you go to lightroom/camera raw or whatever you use for processing, you use the color picker to select the gray on the card as a base for the white balance. Then just sync the white balance info with the rest of your photos. That will give you the best starting point for your color.

On my little P&S camera, I switch to custom white balance, and use a gray area (rock, sand etc) in the tank (if I'm lazy to take the gray card out) to set the reference white balance.

Once you've taken a photo with a gray card, and assuming your led color doesn't change, you can use the same photo over and over to sync the white balance.
 
I've heard of using the card technique. Might just have to try it. I have played with the white balance but it really is too fine and doesn't work enough to compensate for the extreme blue saturation.
 
I received an LED video light (I shoot movies for fun) that has white lights. I took some pics of coral and strangely enough, the purple blotchiness I get from the blue LEDs showed up! To the eye, the corals look like they are lighted under daylight conditions (almost yellow) but what shows up on the sensor is completely different.
 
One of the problems with aquarium lighting is it's not a very natural color, and the way our minds compensate for this in ways our cameras do not. I've tried setting the "correct" white balance, and in my opinion, this does not always yield the truest color. Now, I simply shoot in RAW and adjust the white balance manually in my RAW editor. I know how the corals look to me, and I simply use the sliders to approximate my interpretation of what I see in the tank. It takes some practice, but before long, it only takes 10-20 seconds per image. Playing devil's advocate to myself, the downside is that it is subjective. Let's say for example you're taking pictures to sell your corals online. In this case, using a white balance card may be a better option. So I'll talk to that for a moment:

First, if you don't have a white balance card (and a waterproof one at that), any relatively pure white object will do. The lid of a white 5g bucket for instance. Once you've got that, make sure the object is under water. You need it reflecting the same light that is hitting the subject of your photos (i.e. your aquarium lights). Hold this object at about a 20-45 degree angle from vertical. This will make sure it's reflecting the aquarium lights. If you're setting the white balance in the camera, make sure the card is filling up the majority of the frame (I can never remember exactly how much it needs) and there are no shadows on the card. If you're going to adjust the balance in PP, you just need a decent sized area that's free of shadows, so far more leeway there. Also, if you're going to fix it in post, shooting in RAW is highly encouraged. The compressed formats drop a lot of the color information, and adjusting the white balance of a JPEG can result in noise, color distortion, etc. In RAW, you have none of these issues.

As I write this, I realize there may be one other issue here. Shooting under different color lights can be extremely problematic. The blue LED may be spotlighting one coral with all of its blueness, while another area of the tank is getting all or mostly all of its illumination from your much less blue lights. If playing with the white balance is not enough to make all areas of the tank look correct, you may have to use to versions of your image with different white balance and blend them together in Photoshop or some other editing program.
 
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