Too dark & Too Red ???

While shooting with my nikon d40x 18-55mm f3.5-5.6 lense my pics look great in

camera (correct exposure, color, sharpness etc.) Then when I load them to

photoshop they look way too dark and red and sometimes not as sharp. The skin

tones hardly ever look good. I played around with different settings and use

manual and nonflash modes. I would get excellent pics in same lighting

situations from my old manual camera (nikon fg20) with no flash..yet this

digital camera seems to make horrid looking pics??? What am I doing wrong?

 

Just a note I did buy another lense a 50mm 1.8 and when I use it with the nikon

d40x it takes nice clean clear looking pics that DO look the same in camera and

in photoshop. I don't have to color correct. How could it be that the lense

that came with the camera (18-55mm) makes pics come out red and dark and the

other lense does a great job?<div></div>

Looks like the wrong white balance setting to me.

This image was taken under almost same conditions and settings only with the 50mm.

Darrell....Two problems that I see, and I think both are related to that window behind the subjects. As Peter said, the WB is off, and this might be a result of one type of lighting in the room, and daylight streaming in from outside. The bright daylight in center image made the camera choose a cooler daylight WB, so the interior incandescents look overly warm.

 

The second problem is underexposure. Also likely related to that bright window in center image. Either adjust the exposure, or move to get the window out of the image.

 

Regarding the second image, conditions were not similar in any way. That's why the WB and exposure were so easy for the camera to get right.

this is another image taken with window about 5ft to left of camera..even images taken in lobbt with no window were very red. i do change wb setting to match lighting..also like I said more of the problem is why do the images look good in camera and then turn out like the ones above after being loaded into photoshop?? They do not look red or underexposed in camera.<div></div>

If you are shooting jpeg's thats probaby your problem. Saturation may be set very high or possibly WB issue. Setting it to cloudy or shade pushes warmer colors up. Shoot RAW and this will allow you to have better control of your color/temperature & exposure correction if you use auto exposure. If you dont have a RAW processing program use adobe DNG converter. Free from adobe. This will alow you to open and adjust your images with more basic programs after conversion. You may already know this but its my to cents.

Mixed lighting (daylight, incandescent, fluorescent, flash, etc.) will defy all attempts at easy solutions. Nothing new. It's not just digital. Color film has the same problem. In the bad old days color films produced the same problems. Over the years film manufacturers, especially Fuji, came up with emulsions that handled mixed lighting very well, and minilabs could often produce reasonably neutral prints even on full-auto.

 

Nowadays with digital it's all up to the photographer. You're the lab. You have to get the hang of recognizing different types of lighting and set the camera to compensate. It's a PITA, frankly, and worse with most dSLRs. P&S digicams are better optimized to produce photos that are ready-to-go without so much tweaking.

 

Just practice in different types of lighting. For example, if your kitchen has fluorescent lighting, I'll bet the light over your stove is a regular incandescent bulb. Turn 'em all on. Turn off the camera flash. Try different white balance settings, see what works best.

 

Same elsewhere around the house. Open the blinds or curtains, have someone pose with one side facing the window, the other side facing room light.

 

Keep experimenting. You'll get the hang of it pretty quick.

A look into Exif data showed, that your first and your third image (the ones of the haircutting session) were taken with whitebalance set to manual, while the second one was taken with whitebalance set to automatic.

 

So, to me it seems that your choice for the manual whitebalance wasn't optimal. (How did you do that? gray card? etc). From the reddish tone, its obvious, that the color temperature is too high. Given you took the images in raw mode, thats correctable to an extend, but as mentioned above, light sources with different color temperatures can make live quite hard.

Also judging from the filename you have your camera set to aRGB. Change it back to sRGB unless you have a specific reason to do otherwise.

To me, it looks like the 1st picture is a classic case of strong backlighting on a very constrasty subject (the lady in black). This is fooling your camera's exposure meter, resulting in underexposed picture.

 

To try to get around this, you could move the camera very close to the subject, say 1FT away, and set a manual exposure off the subject, and then move back to your normal spot and take the picture.

 

Or, you could try bumping the exposure UP by 1 stop, by using the next slower shutter speed, the next larger aperture size, or the next slower ISO Setting. This will increase the light exposure in the picture, and it should be so dark next time.

 

You could also try using your camera's pop-up flash for a fill flash, to provide extra light on the subjects that are close in. It won't help the parts of the picture that farther from the camera, but it will make an improvement on how the closer subjects look. If the pop-up flash lighting looks too harsh on the subjects and the shadows come out too strong, you can try diffusing it. They do sell little foam wrap-around diffuser heads that fit onto pop-up flashes ( i recently saw one of these at Wolf Camera store.) Or you could try covering the pop-upflash with a white hankerchif (sp?), to try and diffuse the flash. Either way, i think the pictures would look better if you added some type of fill flash, rather than just all ambient.

 

As the pros have mentioned already, the camera's white balance should be set to match your ambient lighting.

 

A gadget that might help, if you have a little extra money to spend, is an Expodisk. This is a filter-like object that you hold in front of your SLR lens. The you position yourself where the subject is, and point the lens back towards where the picture will be taken. Then you take a dummy picture (with the Expodisk in place). This produces a grey-card image that you then use to set a *custom* white balance on the camera. Then, having set that Custom White Balance, you go back to your picture taking spot, turn around, and take the picture. Your color tones should then come out very close to what you really see. In your scenerio, the Expodisk will filter *in* all the different kinds of light thats bouncing around the room, and using the whole spectrum to make a grey-card image. (But you have to repeat the process every time the light changes.)

If you got better colors with print film, it was probably the result of good color correction during printing. You need to improve your white balancing, and I too would suggest using some fill flash to fill in the shadows.

If you are shooting in RAW, you can go back in ACR and change the white balance until it looks closer to what you want. Like Lex says, you have to be the lab these days. Learn to color balance. I shoot in mixed lighting all the time, and find I have to do quite a bit of adjustment in ACR most of the time. The camera just can't do it.

Fill flash, or bounce flash, or direct flash with soft cup, better with a SB800 flash. As you prefer. All your red, dark and underexposed issues will be fixed, almost by magic.

 

The mixed lights ambients are very difficult to tune. You must check manually the white balance in the important place of the image. Even that, may be some colors could not be correctly registered.

Hey, Darrell. You mentioned a couple of times that the picture when viewed on the camera looks different than when you loaded it onto your computer. I have 2 comments about that:

 

1. Don't trust the image on the LCD display on your camera. You can modify the brightness of the display, and by default, they're overly bright (to make it easier to see the pictures when viewed during daylight), so they'll look brighter than they actually are. Instead, check the histogram and learn how to read the peaks.

 

2. Calibrate your computer's monitor. This, combined with properly reading the histograms, will vastly improve the quality and consistency of your photos, with respect to exposure and white balance.

Thank you all for your insight and great advice. I appreciate everyone's comments - Thank you.

 

Now, on to learning...