Night shot color correction

[srtiwari]

I would like to take more photos, both, indoors and outdoors, at night, without flash. I find the color casts difficult to work with, and so avoid those situations with bulb, fluorescent or mixed lighting. Having a more organized approach might help me deal with this problem. I wonder what most people do.

 

[petronius]

When the color cast works for me, I do nothing. Is it odd, I correct in PS. I see no need to create "right" or "neutral" colors. When I like it, its right.

 

[oftheherd]

I do what the situation requires. I use 400/800 or even 1600 film without flash, then correct colors if they are that objectionable. I use flash, including bounce. I can use my Yashica FX 103 with good auto otf metering, or if another camera, a Vivitar 283/5. If it is really important and I planned ahead, I may even use flash bulbs for a much more even and natural light. I try not to do too much color in low light without flash.

None of your choices seemed to fit that.

 

[fbf]

For light color cast (any kinda source), I tend to overexpose it by 2/3 or 1 stop so the color casting can be somewhat managed. Or you can spend 1 hr or so working in photoshop and try to find the color balance you like.

 

[Al Kaplan]

Subhash, over the past thirty years or so we've gotten more bang for our buck with flourescent and other types of lighting that use a fraction of the electricity of traditional tungsten bulbs for the same visual brightness. Many of these light sources have a discontinuous spectrum. Some wave lengths just aren't there wheras traditional light bulbs have all the colors like the sun, but skewed toward the red end of the spectrum. Put an 80 series blue filter and it'll match daylight. Trying to do that with flourescents or the various types of light sources used for street lighting is an exercize in futility.

An FL-D filter will give you fairly believable (but not accurate) color under a variety of flourescents. It's when you start shooting in a typical indoor situation where you have tungsten, flourescent, and perhaps some window light mixed in that things become touch and go. The light color will vary even within the same room.

You can try to overpower the existing light with eleectronic flash, using multiple units around the room to try to give the effect of the natural lighting. That will give you the most accurate color. Use an amateur color film such as Kodak Gold or the Fuji that Walgreens sells under their own name and shy away from the pro films.

Pro films give fantastic color with the lighting they're designed for. They have great flesh tones, and a wedding dress will be white in electronic flash or daylight conditions. Under mixed lighting you're better off with amateur film. Kodak and Fuji understand that the average person knows squat about color temperature, reciprocity failure, discontinuous spectrums, and all that technical rot. That's for engineers and scientists, not Uncle Joe. He just wants to take his film back to Walgreens and pick up a stack of prints with the proverbial "acceptable color", and most of the time that one-hour set-up comes pretty damned close.

In the end though, you're choices really come down to filtering the existing light sources, overpowering the existing light with flash, filtering the flash that you might be using as fill, going crazy at the computer, or pretending that nobody invented color film yet and shoving a roll of Double-X 5222 B&W film in your Leica. (I know you bought some.)

Vivitar made (or used to make anyway) an orange filter for the flash, 85B, that converts the daylight output of the flash to tungsten. These can be adapted to other brands of flash. It costs you about two stops of light but the auto feature of the flash compensates for that. That's not going to help you with window light or flourescents in the mix, or do a complete job in mixed situations, but it'll give you pretty damned good color with tungsten room lighting.

 

[srtiwari]

Thanks, Al, for a very helpful note. I may buy an FL-D filter for some situations. Unfortunately, the leica Ms aren't very user-friendly when one wants to use fill flash, which might also have helped.

 

[Al Kaplan]

Subhash, amateur color negative films are very forgiving of a stop or two of over exposure. Supposedly you'll get even finer grain, the opposite of what it gives you in B&W. Shooting at 1/50 on the Leica instead of 1/100 or 1/125 at the same f/stop on another camera solves a lot of that problem. Going in the other direction you can shoot at 1/30, even 1/15 or 1/8, to increase the amount of available light in relation to the flash exposure. The flash will give you a crisp enough image of your main subject so a bit of camera unsteadiness won't be very noticeable.

The best thing to do is play around with these techniques and see what the effects are. Sacrifice a roll or two of film. Then when you run into a situation you'll have a pretty good idea of what to do, and you can envision how your photos will turn out.

 

[MartinP]

If you are shooting outdoors at night with a colour film, half of the interest is in the mix of colour-temperatures and (as Al pointed out) the bits which are missing. It wouldn't really be "true" to try and make a town night-scene look like it was actually a daylight shot, surely ?

Indoors with mixed lighting might be different, as often that will have a specific subject which is of interest rather than the scene as a whole. That is the point at which the 'professional' photographer will get out his colour-temperature meter and a collection of compensation filters. I recall examining some colour-neg shots, at work long ago, for someone who had made architects pictures at the hospitality-suite of a new swimming-pool using multiple exposures.

The suite was lit by tungsten, and correctly filtered, while the picture window overlooking the competition swimming-pool was black because the lights were out - then the second, differently filtered, exposure was made with a darkened suite and the swimming-pool lights on. It looked like there was no difference at all in the lighting, instead of the huge orange/green and brightness differences which were really present.

Lighting small indoor scenes imperceptibly is difficult and can involve lots of unnatural things in order to get the natural effect in the picture - which is probably why I never seriously tried location shoots . . . . :-/

 

[dmr]

I've found that the modern Fuji color films from 400-1600 are quite forgiving in available light and mixed light. Slight tweaking of levels can usually correct any objectionable cast.

 

[srtiwari]

If you are shooting outdoors at night with a colour film, half of the interest is in the mix of colour-temperatures and (as Al pointed out) the bits which are missing. It wouldn't really be "true" to try and make a town night-scene look like it was actually a daylight shot, surely ?
. . . . :-/

Precisely. So, would you use "Daylight" film or not, to get "true" colours with mixed lighting at night ?

 

[Al Kaplan]

The only "daylight" color negative films that I know about are the pro films, and they're very unforgiving of tungsten lighting compared to the amateur films. I know that years ago the target color response of films like Kodacolor, which preceded Kodak Gold, was actually clear flash bulbs, about 3800K. Average tungsten room lighting is around 2800K, depending on the bulb wattage. A 25 watt bulb is a bit warmer than a 100 watt bulb. Daylight on a sunny day is around 5500K. That puts a film balanced for clear flash right in the middle, making it fairly easy to correct in either direction. It's possible that between blue flash bulbs becoming universal, and the use of electronic flash even in single use cameras, that today's amateur films are balanced for daylight. They still seem to be more forgiving of "wrong" light than the pro films.