White Balance

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a lex

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Alex
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Hi, looking for a bit of help and im sure this is the best place to ask..!

I took a few photos last night and whilst most of them were fine a few photos which were taken in a certain room had an orange tint to them. Am I right in thinking this is down to the white balance?

I only ever use the default white balance but think that has to chance! What sort of white balance setting should I change to when shooting in doors? Or is it best to set a custom WB and how would I go about doing this?

Thanks.
 
It depends on the lights in the room. If they're normal tungsten bulbs set it to tungsten, if fluorescents set it to that. As long as you're not using flash it doesn't matter much as long as you shoot RAW cos you can fix it in PP.

If you're shooting flash you'll need to gel the head to match the light in the room and set your body to match.
 
If the pics were taken under the old style incandescent bulbs then you would get exactly that cast.

If you have a Canon camera and shoot in RAW then this can be corrected in DPP if you have a small piece of something white in the pic.

Just use the "eye dropper" on the piece of white (even though it may look orange) to get a reasonable result.


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It depends on your camera really. Indoors I tend to shoot with tungsten or fluorescent settings as dictate by the lighting in the room. If you're shooting RAW it doesn't matter as much since you can change the WB later on during PP if it is required.

About the images you were taking in that room. You are right, that orange tint will be the auto white balance not properly judging correctly because of the light(s) in the room. In that case if the images are coming out very orange then try switching to Tungsten white balance and that should have you sorted.

Tom N.
 
Cheers for that. The camera I was using was a 450D and was bouncing the flash of the ceiling. Just tried both the tungsten and fluorescent settings here and instead of an orange tint im getting a sort of blue tint.. not a clue whats going on!!

Also, is it worth setting a custom white balance? Someone mentioned about getting a grey card, shooting that under lighting conditions and setting that photo as the custom white balance?

Thanks for the help, appreciated.
 
The23rdman said:
If you're shooting flash you'll need to gel the head to match the light in the room and set your body to match.
Click to expand...


What colour gel would I need to combat the orange tint? Does it have to be gel or would one of the coloured stofen diffusers help?


As you can probably all tell im new to this and still learning so the help really is appreciated :)
 
For tungsten lighting (typically orange) you'd want an orange gel for your flash, specifically CTO (colour temperature orange). These are available in different strengths for differently lit environments. You can get swatch packs with gel snippets just big enough for a flash head from Rosco or Lee filters.
 
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