Blue photos?

[crystal_smith5]

<p>Hi all- I noticed on my childs photos recently that they are very "bluish"? There isnt nice skin tones... am I doing something wrong? Are my lights up to high? Is there a way that I can edit them?<br>

(Im shooting with a Rebelxt, 2-300ws monolights)</p>

<p>Thank you all for your help, I LOVE this site... I can ask a question and have an answer the same day! :-)</p>

[Tim_Lookingbill]

<p>Color temp error the camera chose.</p>

<p>Two options:</p>

<p>First option is for shooting Jpegs-do a custom white balance using a spectrally flat neutral object like a WhiBaL card (around $20) or Mellitta white coffee filter.</p>

<p>Second option-shoot Raw and fix in post.</p>

[mike_stemberg]

<i>Is there a way that I can edit them?</i><br><br>Yes, depending on what photo-editor you have access to, you can change the colour temperature to ensure that all whites are white, all grays are gray ...and every other colour should fall into place. A common tool has a dropper icon or such like for you to click on something in the image that you know to be white. Knowing what photo-editing you have available would have made answering your query a lot easier and/or meaningful.

[kevin_delson]

<p>You can clear much of the "color cast" depending how bad it is, but not eliminate it unless you shot RAW. White balance and color casts are not the same technically.</p>

<p>It seems more importantly that you find out and cure for the "blue" color cast problem.<br>

My guess is your white balance is is set improperly. </p>

[hal_b]

<p>Blue typically means that you are White-Balanced for Tungsten light, and your lights are daylight. You might get away with setting white balance to "daylight". Otherwise, when it comes to using custom white balance, you can cheat and use a white piece of paper rather than a professional white/grey card. This will get you easily within the ballpark of the correct white balance.</p>

<p>For the photos that are already shot: no choice but to correct the Color Temperature (Lightroom) or Color Balance (Photoshop).</p>

[crystal_smith5]

<p>I belive that I have my WB on auto...I will try all of these... THANK YOU SO MUCH!</p>

[andrewg_ny]

<p>If your flashes (monolights) are the primary light source, you either need to gel them to match ambient light or set white balance to match their color temperature. A very valuable advantage of shooting RAW is that you can losslessly set white balance after the fact during post-processing. Correcting white balance in JPEG is much less effective.</p>

<p>The tip to use white/grey card doesn't really work if you're using ambient light to set white balance but most of your illumination during exposure comes from the monolights.</p>

[crystal_smith5]

<p>1- I have heard alot people talkin about shooting RAW... but have alot of problems... what are the pros and cons to shooting RAW?<br>

2-WHen you say to "gel" them... what does that mean? Im rather new to photography.<br>

Mike- Im using PSelements 7<br>

Thanks so much for your solutions!!</p>

[hal_b]

<p>1- All cameras shoot in RAW (recording red, green, and blue data independently). Usually, when you set it to JPG, the cameras makes some instant decisions about white balance, sharpness, noise correction, etc, and converts the RAW to a compressed JPG image. It then deletes the RAW data, never to be recovered again. Sometimes the camera doesn't do a good job. When the camera gets the White Balance wrong, it can delete ALOT of important data regarding color in order to determine the color at each individual pixel. If you have the RAW data, you can manually set the levels and white balance BEFORE the JPG conversion. This ensures a much better JPG.</p>

<p>In your case, the RAW-to-JPG converter interpreted way too much blue, and all your pixels have some blue information which is not correct. When you remove the blue hue, you are left with a diminished version of the remaining colors.</p>

<p>The con to RAW is that it takes up ALOT of hard drive space, is unusable until converted to JPG or TIFF, and this can be time consuming as well. You can also get lost in a time warp vector if you obsess about adjusting a particular image until it is absolutely perfect.</p>

<p>2- A "gel" is a transparent piece of colored plastic, made to match to colors of other lights. Tungsten lights (lightbulbs) are yellow (maybe a little orange). Flourescents are green. Daylight is blue, as are commericial flashes and strobes. Since your strobes are already blue, you apply an orange filter (CTO) to balance with the Tungsten bulbs in the room. Now you set White Balance to Tungsten and all the orange light looks white: you're set.</p>

[andrewg_ny]

<p>The RAW files are also larger on your camera as well so more SD (flash memory) card space is used so you can't fit as many pictures on a card. Processing the RAW files is more demanding on your computer in terms of storage space, memory, and processing time so if your computer is particularly old you might find it somewhat more sluggish than you'd like. You're also more limited in terms of viewing and processing the files--you need to use a RAW converter first to render a JPEG or TIFF.</p>

<p>This last point is often highlighted as some sort of major stumbling block but to me it doesn't matter much--in most cases you'll be downsizing the image for sharing/e-mailing/posting to web anyway so this doesn't really seem to be an extra step for me.</p>

<p>The main thing is to pick software that works well for you--I found I liked post-processing & working with RAW files much more once I started using Adobe Lightroom. Not sure what kind of RAW-processing abilities are built into PS Elements.</p>

[kari v]

<p>One of the best features of RAW capture becomes very clear in situations like yours: you can set any white balance in post. Even if your jpgs are totally blue, like when using tungsten balance with flash, it can be fixed in seconds without ill effects.</p>

<p>RAW is pretty much as the name suggests. It's independent of all camera settings. You can set saturation, contrast, sharpening, noise reduction... after you've done the shooting. *Camera settings only affect jpgs*. To get any better results than with camera generated jpg takes some practice though.</p>

<p>I always shoot RAW in difficult lighting situations in order to get best possible file for editing. You can recover blown highlights to some extent (totally impossible with jpg), lifting shadow areas is cleaner and drastic edits have smoother tonal transitions. When shooting over ISO 800 where noise starts to creep in you can adjust noise reduction to your own taste, balance between detail and smoothness, or even apply noise reduction only to select targets and leave other areas crisp. Also, when you want every subtle detail out from a landscape shot I prefer my own processing to most camera jpgs.<br>

It's not always worth the trouble but well worth looking into.</p>

[kari v]

<p>Here's a good example. Scroll down and open the full sized images. Alternate between the converted RAW and camera JPG. JPG looks snappier and more colorful but take a look how fine detail compares and which one has more clarity and realistic look.<br>

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/PanasonicGF1/page15.asp</p>

<p>Here's an example of high ISO and custom noise reduction. Open ISO 1600 camera JPG and RAW + Neat Image files (middle of the page).<br>

Look how much more blotchy the sky is in the JPG and how much more clarity and detail RAW has in the windows. That tight grain like noise you see in converted RAW will be invisible in print but you can't bring back detail from the JPG.<br>

http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/nikon/d3000-review/using</p>

[bob_bill]

<p>Your camera was sad that day. No, just a white balance issue. In photoshop move the eyedropper around what looks like a neutral grey and just watch for the red green blue numbers get to equal or nearly so, click and it should be right on or really close. </p>