white blanace with flash

[elaine marie]

Simple question looking for a simple answer. When shooting in a

venue with tungsten lighting with a flash do you set the white

balance for flash or tungsten...or auto? Thanks

[NK Guy]

There isn't a simple answer. It depends on what effect you're trying to achieve.

 

If you're using fill flash then the light from the flash, which is balanced for daylight, will add a

bluish colour cast to the foreground unless you put a filter on the flash. If you're using the

flash as primary source of light then the background will look yellowish or orangeish unless,

again, your flash is filtered. If you're using bounce flash then it depends on the colour of the

surface you're bouncing from.

 

What white balance you set depends on the look you're trying to achive.

[lex_jenkins]

With my D2H and SB-800 I can custom white balance through the lens, which tries to strike a compromise between WB for flash and ambient light. Sometimes it's successful, sometimes not. When the ambient light is radically different from the flash the only solution is to gel the flash appropriately for the artificial light and custom white balance the camera. This is tricky because without a color meter it's difficult to determine the best possible choice for a flash gel. I just try to get as close as possible and fix it during post processing.

[bruce_rubenstein___nyc]

I use a fixed Kelvin temperature white balance. I shoot a neutral grey or white target at a few Kelvin settings and then check in Photoshop to see which setting gave the most neutral color using the color picker and reading the numbers (RGB should be equal). I check the temperature with and without a diffuser. I know that my SB600 and Quantum with diffusers are 5600ﾺ K. If you gel your flash to match ambient tungsten, they will not be exactly the same. Using the same procedure above I would determine the actual temperature of the gelled flash and use that value.

 

Auto WB, either with the Nikons or Canons that I've used produced too cold of a WB (too blue). The only killer with a manual WB is if you shoot JPGs, change the lighting and not change the WB on the camera you'll wind up doing a "convert to grey scale". (You can sort of fix a way off WB, but it never looks really good.) If you have trouble remembering to change setting on the fly, shoot RAW or Auto WB.

[picturesque]

Simple answer--flash. Complicated answers--unless you are gelling the flash to match or somewhat match the tungsten (when you set the white balance for a tungsten temperature), or auto white balance if shooting RAW (for fix up later in conversion) with either flash or tungsten set.

[dennisprice]

If flash is your primary light source and your subjects are people, set WB for flash.

 

On tungsten setting (with flash), faces will have a noticeable blue cast, which many viewers find unpleasant. Better to have a yellow/orange cast in other areas of the picture than to have blue skin tones in the main subject.

 

Best to shoot RAW so you can fine-tune WB for each shot if necessary.

[mark u]

In addition to gel filters there are other modifiers you can use with shoe mount flashes. For example, Stofen makes "gold" versions of their Omnibounce diffusers to fit many flashguns. Lumiquest also offer gold reflectors with their Pocketbounce and similar reflectors that can be useful when you are faced with ceilings that are too high to use bounce flash or when the ceiling/walls would give an unwanted colour cast with bounce flash.