Night shoot Orange cast

LeoB

Hi Folks,
I was out last night with a few friends taking some photographs and was wondering is there any way of getting rid of the horrible orange cast from street lights or a way of minimizing it.

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I was playing around with different settings but all had this horrible orange glow which I hate. They were ok in Black and White.


Any tips or hints much appreciated.
LeoB

32finn

What white balance setting were you using?

PCPhoto

white balance on your camera..... try doing a custom white balance (using a sheet of card)

colour cast is from the street lights (cant remember if its incandescent or flourescent light which is the similar white balance pre-set on most cameras)

EDIT_ Beaten to it .... goddamn all my typing of a longer message.

pete4130

ITs the white balance setting you need to adjust on your camera. If you'r shooting in jpeg mode its not as easy to correct. It's just the "colour temperature" of the lighting (like flourescent lights give a greenish cast, tungsten yellow/orange).

Cameras don't see white the way we and our brains do. you can try the different white balance settings on your camera, or you can do a pre-set white balance or custom white balance which is basically getting a neutral 17% grey card (which can be bought cheap enough in cam stored) or I use a white sheet of paper and pre set the white balance to the paper so the camera knows what should be white. The street lamps at night are sort of the far end of the colour temperature though and can be hard to handle.

32finn

Well PC, at least you can claim, 2 great minds and all that :-)

LeoB

32finn wrote: »

What white balance setting were you using?

I tried 3 or 4 different settings on the white balance menu (eos 40d)

PCPhoto wrote: »

white balance on your camera..... try doing a custom white balance (using a sheet of card)

colour cast is from the street lights (cant remember if its incandescent or flourescent light which is the similar white balance pre-set on most cameras)

EDIT_ Beaten to it .... goddamn all my typing of a longer message.

Will get card today.

pete4130 wrote: »

ITs the white balance setting you need to adjust on your camera. If you'r shooting in jpeg mode its not as easy to correct. It's just the "colour temperature" of the lighting (like flourescent lights give a greenish cast, tungsten yellow/orange).

Cameras don't see white the way we and our brains do. you can try the different white balance settings on your camera, or you can do a pre-set white balance or custom white balance which is basically getting a neutral 17% grey card (which can be bought cheap enough in cam stored) or I use a white sheet of paper and pre set the white balance to the paper so the camera knows what should be white. The street lamps at night are sort of the far end of the colour temperature though and can be hard to handle.

Yeah I shoot in jpeg all the time.
I will try these tonight in the garden. It probably didnt help my poor brain it was cold last night. There was a N/E wind coming in off the Irish sea which would skin you.

Thank you for the quick replies.

pete4130

If you shoot RAW you can adjust the white balance afterwards once uploaded to your comp, so you could adjust the white balance then convert to jpg if that was easiest for you.

5uspect

Crappy incandescent white balance has been a common complaint on Canon cameras for years now and Canon don't seem to care. Since a lot of people shoot RAW it doesn't really matter I guess.

magicbastarder

i'm not sure if white balance is going to be of any use.

those lights are almost certainly not incandescent lights (i.e. tungsten); they're sodium lights, and transmit a *much* reduced spectrum compared to flourescent and incandescent, afaik; the latter two have a fairly continuous spectrum (means they transmit all colours), but the dominant colours are 'shifted', whereas with sodium, it simply does not emit most colours, so it's much harder to pull a natural looking shot out of.

i usually end up converting these to b&w.

oshead

Why try too hard to correct for night lights. Street lights are yellow, traffic lights are red, orange and green. Most shops use whiteish light. You'll find greens and blues everywhere too. Why not use the colours of the night to your advantage. If you try to compensate all the time for sodium vapor lights you will find the other light in your images becoming excessively blue and you may loose the very atmosphere you were trying to capture. I suggest putting the white balance to a neutral setting of white light (5000 K)and take it forward from there. You can always use lightroom and photoshop later to selectively adjust the intensity of the different colors.

magicbastarder

oshead wrote: »

You can always use lightroom and photoshop later to selectively adjust the intensity of the different colors.

that's the problem with sodium though - there *are* no different colours. it's a monochromatic light.
however, i've just read that high pressure sodium lights emit a more continuous spectrum, so if that's the light source, you may have some luck.

oshead

magicbastarder wrote: »

that's the problem with sodium though - there *are* no different colours. it's a monochromatic light.
however, i've just read that high pressure sodium lights emit a more continuous spectrum, so if that's the light source, you may have some luck.

I hear you, the spectrum is very narrow, all yellow. Wiki is a wonderful source of information.

oshead

RelicOlin wrote: »

Few friends taking some photographs and was wondering is there any way of getting rid of the horrible orange cast from street lights or a way of minimizing it.

Did you not read the any of the posts above

gbee

LeoB wrote: »

I tried 3 or 4 different settings on the white balance menu (eos 40d)

LeoB, you won't really shift this. The best you can try is a custom white balance. Exact procedure is explained in the manual.

But you take a picture in the same light on a white card, the card must fill the frame [or most of it] and you then register this image as a white balance and give it a name [Street].

Select this WB and shoot. A little over exposure helps as well.

From my own experience you don't get a perfect result.
From my own experience you can't PP this out very well.

magicbastarder

oshead wrote: »

Did you not read the any of the posts above

it's spam.

Heebie

If you shoot in raw, you should be able to correct the white balance (at least to a degree) upon importing the RAW file. (Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom both do this well.)

magicbastarder

again, that won't work for a standard sodium lamp, as it's a monochromatic source.
there will not be any blue or green information in the file to enough of an extent to be able to boost them.

5uspect

It will work to a degree since you're going to get scattering from many surfaces resulting in somewhat of a broadening of the spectrum. As I said above Canon is known for poor WB performance so the cast may appear worse than it actually is.

Would be good to see a spectrograph reading for a typical street tho.

goldseeker

Iwannahurl

I don't take night shots any more because of the sodium street lights. Back in the day I did a lot more night-time streetscapes when fluorescent lights were the norm.

That said, I will try out some of the suggestions made in this thread, just in case they produce acceptable results.

Maybe in time sodium streetlights will be replaced by LEDs. In which case, we're back in business...

magicbastarder

5uspect wrote: »

you're going to get scattering from many surfaces resulting in somewhat of a broadening of the spectrum.

i had understood scattering as being a 'diffusing' of the light, not as a smearing of the spectrum?

Zillah

You could so something like this:


But as has been said, the reason your shots look orange is because city lights are bathing the environment in orange light. There isn't any way to 'fix' it any more than you can 'fix' the green colour of grass or the blue of the sky. That's what it actually looks like.

ps I absolutely loathe sodium lights. That orange glow is disgusting.

5uspect

magicbastarder wrote: »

i had understood scattering as being a 'diffusing' of the light, not as a smearing of the spectrum?

It depends on the environment but you'll get both in varying degrees. Surfaces can refract light differently and cause shifts in wavelength. Granted you've got a huge feckoff peak from the source.

A bit of googling threw up this spectrum for a sodium street light.




But the camera should cover it with at least two channels: