Car + Night and looking yellow from street lights

[Anto Modded]

Not used to taking photo's at night, but i tried a quick attempt on a white car in the street with orangey street lights, i used a low iso of 100 and selected tongsten in the white balance to try help with the orange street lights and choose f/8 on the dial. I used a tripod and a shutter release and image was good but just the car turned out more orange than white and so did most of the picture. Just wondering should i go custom white balance or buy a blue filter. Anyone know where im going wrong. I deleted the pics from my laptop cause i wasnt happy with them but i will put up a pic of the same type like i took.....

Dont know what settings the guy used but its the same orangey colour i got from my photo. I guess with a yellow light it wouldnt be possible to get it all out but even to minimise it would help
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v336/AntoModded/jpeg0015.jpg

[tonylong]

Night lights are pretty notorious for having unpredictable color tones. You can try a custom white balance if you have a scene that's uniformly lit, but typically you have more than one type of lighting.

If you are serious about nailing a shot, whether you want to set a custom white balance or not, you will likely need to adjust things in post-processing. You will get your best results if you shoot RAW, because you will have more data to adjust and a white balance won't be "fixed" in a jpeg.

You can still adjust the white balance with a jpeg to some extent, but there is a limit, so especially if you are shooting jpeg a custom WB will help.

[DStanic]

For night shots I shoot in RAW and then adjust WB in Lightroom or ACR.

[Anto Modded]

So really i need to shoot raw so i can have more control over the shot to adjust in photoshop or similar software. Thanks for the help

[tonylong]

So really i need to shoot raw so i can have more control over the shot to adjust in photoshop or similar software. Thanks for the help

RAW is your best bet. But, for an existing jpeg, there are color-correcting tools you can try. The example you posted is pretty extreme, but programs lik Photoshop and Lightroom as well as DPP (the software that comes with your camera if you have a Canon DSLR) have several possible approaches to adjusting the temperature and hue of an image, so it's worth giving it a try.

But, for future reference, RAW gives you the most latitude in working with tricky lighting scenes like this.

[Anto Modded]

Yes i have a canon, and will look at the software and thanks for the advice,

[FLuX43]

Problem- Most street lamps around where I live are 1000w metal halide lamps. This type of light has a Kelvin rating around 3,000k. Your camera only has a preset for tungsten and fluorescent.

Solution- use a gray card or shoot in RAW.

[neilwood32]

Problem- Most street lamps around where I live are 1000w metal halide lamps. This type of light has a Kelvin rating around 3,000k. Your camera only has a preset for tungsten and fluorescent.

Solution- use a gray card or shoot in RAW.

+1 for that.

The only way to get accurate results is take a custom white balance either using a Whibal (or equiv) or a grey card. Its a PITA but its worth it if you want predictable results. Also shoot RAW just in case to give you the additional security.

The problem is that while you see it as white, your camera sees what is actually there. The reason is your brain is very good at processing out the tones from street lights or flourescents.

[sgogula]

I would adjust WB in photoshop.

[Metalstrm]

As far as I know (and please experts correct me if I'm wrong), you cannot really correct for that kind of lighting. Anything short of totally desaturating the image won't give you white in the correct places. The problem is with the color rendition of the source light. Sodium light has a very poor rendition. This is because sodium sources typically have a relatively pure yellow emission (not so pure, but pure enough for our purposes) with two close natural frequencies in the yellow band. So what happens is that anything reflective of yellow light will look yellow. Anything that absorbs yellow frequencies will look black. This makes it difficult to color correct since the other colors are practically non existent in the scene. In fact, if you look at the histogram of the image you posted, you'll see that the blue channel is very dim, whereas the red and green (giving yellow together) are bright.

This is unlike tungsten lamps, which typically emit a broad range of colors. In this case most colors we normally see in broad daylight will be present in the reflected light, so color rendition is much better, although with a yellow cast(a peak of the source light in the warm area of the spectrum). This makes it easy to color correct.

Look up color rendition in wikipedia, it's quite an interesting read.

[number six]

As far as I know (and please experts correct me if I'm wrong), you cannot really correct for that kind of lighting. Anything short of totally desaturating the image won't give you white in the correct places. The problem is with the color rendition of the source light. Sodium light has a very poor rendition. This is because sodium sources typically have a relatively pure yellow emission (not so pure, but pure enough for our purposes) with two close natural frequencies in the yellow band. So what happens is that anything reflective of yellow light will look yellow. Anything that absorbs yellow frequencies will look black.

A good explanation. I downloaded the posted pic and looked at it with the color eyedropper in PSP.

I gather the car is white - the front bumper gave RGB values of 196, 60, 0 (lower bumper between the two specular highlights).

So: there is no blue reflected at all. Nothing to work with. This picture can never be color balanced.

The only hope would be color replacement, but the result is pretty well assured to look like a comic book.

-js

[Anto Modded]

I was out a few nights ago shooting night trails and took another pic, only a quick one, didnt bother lining up the car or anything, i used the canon photo software which got it white but somewhat more black and white. And i forgot to set the camera to raw as suggested but i will try this again. here are the 2 pics. origonal yellow and edited white.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v336/AntoModded/yellow.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v336/AntoModded/white.jpg

[number six]

This pic isn't as extreme as the example in post #1. In that one there was no blue in the lighting at all, while here the blue is about half as intense as the red: RGB values 209, 124, 103 on the nose in the center, below the badge.

The adjusted version is still a long way from white (or gray), with RGB 158, 141, 113. The adjustment basically just reduced the red and the green, with a slight increase in blue.

(True white is 255, 255, 255 and for any shade of gray, R = G = B.)


-js

[sunking39]

I you have a camera that allows to set white balance to kelvin, put it at 3000, like someone said. Or use custom wb and use a picture of the car surface itself as the white reference, its simple. You can then work in post processing if you want. Its better to start work with a picture closer to what you want and u get better results.

[number six]

It doesn't matter how much you try to adjust white balance if the illumination is strictly limited to one wavelength (or two, as Kristian points out in the case of sodium vapor lamps).

If there is no blue in the light source you're out of luck. As much as you might try to increase the blue, 100 times zero is still zero.

-js

[Anto Modded]

Thanks for the info, i will try what you suggested and work from there.

[hollis_f]

If there is no blue in the light source you're out of luck. As much as you might try to increase the blue, 100 times zero is still zero.

-js
Best way to illustrate this would be to take up the OP's suggestion of using a blue filter. Just looking through the viewfinder should be enough to persuade the shooter that they're on a hiding to nothing.