White Ballance problem indoors.

[simann]

One of my passions, is photographing the interior of old pubs. The problem with

this of course is getting the white balance correct, I do try to get it right

before taking the shot, but with all the different lighting, dark woods and

yellowing walls in these establishments its not easy. I try to get it somewhere

near correct, but always seem to end up with a yellow cast over everything, and

this includes the skin tones of customers. I have tried to correct this using

the variations tool in Photoshop 7, but this seems to be an all or nothing

correction and will not allow slight variations to be used. Is there some

program within PS where this white balance problem can be corrected, if there

is, what is it and how is it used?

I have to say I don't use flash, but prefer to rely on lens (f/1.4 30mm) and

camera settings.

[rainer_t]

Simon,

 

likely the best you can do, is to shoot raw (rather than in-camera jpg),

and set the desired whitebalance in the raw-conversion.

 

Rainer

[john_bright]

Simon

 

'The Imaging Factory' tool for correcting white balance looks quite useful. There's a free trial. Give it a try.

 

http://www.theimagingfactory.com/

 

Good luck

[mark u]

Have you tried setting a custom white balance when you take the images? Take a sheet of white paper with you as a white balance target. Of course, you'll probably suffer from mixed lighting, but it will give you a better starting point than AWB on jpegs. If you are going to use flash, you should use a straw coloured gel on the flash to produce light that is similar to the ambient lighting. A Roscoe Cinegel swatchbook is a good source of different gels, although they are harder to obtain in the UK than the US. Try theatrical lighting suppliers.

[ronald_moravec1]

In CS2 at the bottom of the layer pallet there is a circle, half black and half white divided diagonally.

 

L click on it and make a color correction adjustment layer. You get 3 sliders, yellow- blue, maganta- green, and red- cyan. Move the yellow-blue towards blue.

 

You can also get there by the tool bar at the top. Layer-new adjustment layer-color balance.

 

RAW is is not necessary.

 

It would be best if you did a custom white balance at time of shooting or at least set the white balance to indoor light so you would be at least close. One big advantage of digi is there is always the right kind of film in the camera!

[mag_miksch]

Maybe you cannot set it without problems, and <br>

maybe this is the reason why people use filters on the lights or on the windows to get a controlled light situation and <br>

maybe you cannot solve any situation by setting WB, if its proper for one frequency its wrong for the others and<br>maybe its a good idea to get some knowledge about the basics of light and dont trust in the omnipotent digital<br>

maybe you can try to "fix it in the post": Say you have 3 kinds of light, day, bulb and neon, so you make 3 layers in PS and set WB different on each layer, according to your lightsources and mask it out.<br>

maybe this is one of the reasons why people indoors are often shot in BW.<br>

Regards<br>

Martin

[robert_martin5]

If you want JPG's out of the camera then you need to set a custom white balance using a white or gray card. You can not correct a JPG from the camera if the white balance the camera used is not close to the final value because some of the data is no longer available in the JPG image. Look at www.WhiBal.com and find the WhiBal plugin for Photoshop. This Plugin allows you to correct JPG images if you have one JPG image with the WhiBal reference included in the image. You click on the gray reference card an it corrects white balance for that image. You can then apply that correction to all other images that were taken under the same lighting conditions. All images must be taken with white balance set to the same value for this to work. I purchased the WhiBal card and this works very good, but I use it more for RAW processing than JPG.

 

RAW processing is the best way to solve this issue. Shoot a reference shot with a gray card in the scene and use that shot to set the white balance for other shots in the same lighting.

[simann]

Thank you for the feed back. I was out today shooting a few Raw shots to try out. I think this is the way to go, although I have not put it to the real test as yet. I like the idea of the Whibal plug in for PS but until I get the hang of it I shall carry on converting in Canon Zoom browser. The only thing is in ZB I have to treat every shot individually, I can't find anything within this program to Batch correct, unless some knows different.

[robert_martin5]

Simon, I use Adobe Photoshop CS2 RAW converter with Bridge to set white balance.

 

I select a folder of images at one time and then in Bridge select the reference image and all others that were taken in the same lighting condition. Click on the reference and it sets white balance for all selected images at the same time. I then select each image one at a time and make all other adjustments - exposure, shadow, brightness, contrast, saturation, tone curve, etc. I repeat this for each reference shot and all images that apply to that reference shot. Then click the Done button, which will save all seffings for each image - I convert my NEF files to DNG so the slider settings are saved in the DNG file rather than a sidecar XMP file.

 

I then run an Action to process all images in that folder and save the results in another foler.

[sebastian_sebastian]

Hi...

 

You didn't specified which camera you using ....May be I can help you..?

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