Home/office lighting - huge difficulties balancing warm CFL light

[motoroller]

I take my fair share of indoor photos both at home and (before lockdown) at family and friends' places. I've always found it very difficult to balance the indoor light (particularly CFL) with the outdoor light streaming in from windows. Are there any ways to deal with this?

Separately, are there better fittings I can get? I've tried some low-power Phillips LED ones and a wide variety of CFL bulbs (mostly 2700K) from the huge variety of fittings we already have at home, but none of them have helped. I don't think it's as simple as the colour temperature, but I also don't have CRI ratings on either the CFL or LEDs.

For now, I resort to turning the lights off when I want to get better photos.

 

[Garry Edwards]

You're setting yourself an impossible task, for a number of reasons.
1. Household fluorescent lights tend to flicker, so unless you're using a very long shutter speed it comes down to luck whether they happen to be at full brightness while the shutter is fully open.
2. The colour temperature won't be daylight (whatever that actually is)
3. The colour of actual daylight varies enormously, depending on the time of day as well as the time of year - not a problem when daylight is the only light source but a big problem whenever it's mixed.
4. These CFL lamps will have very low power compared to daylight, at least on a bright day with a lot of daylight coming into the room, so will contribute little to the shot.
5. CFL lights have a discontinuous colour spectrum, and those that are designed for domestic use always seem to have a very low CRI figure, which will always distort colour rendition (low CRI)

Your obvious answer is to use flash instead, which will overpower both the daylight and whatever artificial light also happens to be present. Apart from the obvious benefit of not having to worry about the colour of the light, you'll also have proper control over light position.

 

[Phil V]

What @Garry Edwards said
You can mix flash and daylight, you can mix flash and other artificial light sources using gels (if you absolutely have to) but cfl or led with daylight will be a pain unless you spend a lot on quality lamps like the tv and film industry (and I mean a lot of money)

 

[Richard King]

Use a tripod.

Shoot several frames

1. A flash frame...
2. Several bracketed ambent frames with lights off
3. A decently exposed ambient frame with lights on
4. Other flash frames for specular highlights, or to kill shadows

Windows: sometimes you need a head on flash frame you use this if you want a clean window pull of the outside

In photoshop

1. Add each frame to a layer, and align them

2. Take your bracketed frames, and blend them (usually you mask by hand)

3. When you are happy with your blended lights off ambient frames. Add the flash frame on top, and blend this layer using colour mode.. You will now have a pretty good lights off image

4. Now hand blend the lighting layer on top you are blending the lights and the local light pool they ping on the ceiling or wall

5. If you want, at this stage, you can easily change the colour if all the lights to be the same
6. Blend on your additional flash frames as needed