White Balance Help

[dlux4life]

Hi Guys-

Let me preface this by saying that I am a total novice with photography....

My father lent my his Nikon D7000 and tri pod to take some pictures of my tank about a year ago. I took a few pictures and had some issues with adjusting the white balance. I tried setting a custom white balance which didnt work too well and then decided to use the best of the settings that came with the camera.


In speaking with some friends that are more photography buffs, they suggest shooting in raw and adjusting the white balance in some sort of post imaging software.

Does anyone have any reccomendations for some cheaper processing software?

Would someone mind adjusting the two images attached below so I can see the difference between an adjusted an non-adjusted image?

 

[Reef Bass]

Yeah, with proper white balance you'd be smiling with your pics. That camera came with software to do what you ask. There are also free programs such as Gimp. And in the low cost department is Photoshop Elements.

 

[SushiGirl]

Sorry for making them attachments, but don't want to load them onto my Flickr page to post full size since they're not mine. Just click for full size.

These were done very quickly using PhotoImpact Pro, which runs $85 and does most of the same stuff as more expensive programs.

 

[BlueCorn]

Adobe Lightroom. It's not quite as cheap but it'll change your life.

In addition to white balance, using your RGB histogram is also very useful. Both of those images are clipping in the blue channel. A standard luminosity histogram wouldn't show that.

 

[dlux4life]

So I borrowed the camera again and took some new shots. I uploaded them on to my girlfriend's mac book pro and used i-photo to adjust the white balance of the pictures. I think they look much better.

 

[Munchdog]

Definite improvement, keep it up!

 

[SushiGirl]

They look a lot better than mine too LOL.

 

[dlux4life]

Thanks. He's looking at getting a couple new lenses. Maybe I can talk him in to a macro lense!

 

[IslandCrow]

Shooting in raw format is definitely a very good idea with aquarium photography, as proper white balance can be tricky. Unfortunately, jpeg strips a lot of the original color information, so achieving correct color balance after the fact with jpeg is usually difficult at best, whereas it's extremely simple with raw. There's also no need to buy any expensive software if that's all you need to do. As someone else mentioned, all Canon cameras come with a program called Digital Photo Professional (or something like that with the initials DPP). I'm pretty sure you can also just download it from the Canon website. I really don't use this particular program, so I'm not real familiar with its interface, but it should have two sliders that control the color temperature and the tint. It will take a little fiddling with until you get a feel for it, but these are the sliders you'll want to adjust. You'll most likely want to move the color temperature towards red (left) and possibly have to tweak the tint just a little.