need some white balance help guys

i have been struggling with getting a good white balance for the basketball gym i shoot in. i have been told that my photos lately have some green in them from a bad WB setting. for this game i recently shot i took a WB reading off a white piece of paper center court and made it a custom WB setting in camera and then used the shot to adjust all the WB in my shots in light room 3. this photo from the other night seems to represent our gym rather well considering our walls really are off white with a pee yellow ceiling, gym was built in 70's. i do not have a fancy monitor so i have never seen the green that was mentioned in the past. can you guys let me know how the colors in the shot look WB wise.

the gym im shooting in has uneven mixed lighting. this shot was taken with my 7D and 50 1.8 at ISO 2500 f2 1/500

thanks in advance. i hope to get some advice and feed back.

Be thankful this is digital and not film. I shot the NYSE once for an annual report -- it had skylights, then mercury vapors, then fluorescents, and finally tungsten on desks. We called it crossover; one area is one color and another another. It's a no win.

#12: the highlights looks white enough, but the player and ball too look green, and even the blacks on the uniform are tinted.
#5: look at the mercury vapors in the ceiling -- there's a magenta one in the bunch of green or cyan ones. The shot is very green (maybe with some yellow).

Personally I don't know what to tell you. I'm sure there are sports guy on here that can. My approach would be make selections in photoshop and try to white balance sections. To me, it's that crossover stuff, where one correction can't do the whole thing. Not very helpful, but if you don't have to process a hundred, it might work. Sorry

Hi Brian:

your shots definitely have a green cast to them. Here's a tool I've used in gyms shooting HS basketball: http://www.bhphotovide​o.com …68395&Q=&is=REG​&A=details

I put it on a kid and take a shot of the card around or near the paint area where I hope to get a lot of shots. When game images are being processed, I pull up the image with the Whi-Bal card, select all additional images from the game and use the eye-dropper on the Whi-Bal card to correct all images at the same time.

Here's an image from a gym similar to yours. The lights make the upper walls and ceiling where this image was taken look like the same 'pee yellow' color you speak of:

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …erphotography/5​462017650/

Don't use white paper next time, try a grey card (18% grey). I use an expo disc but if you don't want to spend the $100 I have heard you can take a white melita coffee filter and place it over the lens just like an expo disc and it works pretty good.

I think either do as McLuckie stated (which personally I'd not take the time to do unless one was purchased, I'd then edit that way before printing), or just get as close as you can. Between the different color temperatures and ISO it's a no win situation. I shot in a gym last weekend, very similar setup with different temperature vapors as well as fluorescent. Thankfully I shoot with strobes so it was not an issue...other then when I got there all they had on was the fluorescent. Right before the game started they turned on the mercury vapors...took me half the game to figured out I was no longer two stops below ambient. And was not until I was between games that I realized they only turn the mercury's on for the actual games and not for warmups.

snyderman wrote in post #13479506
Hi Brian:

your shots definitely have a green cast to them. Here's a tool I've used in gyms shooting HS basketball:
I put it on a kid and take a shot of the card around or near the paint area where I hope to get a lot of shots. When game images are being processed, I pull up the image with the Whi-Bal card, select all additional images from the game and use the eye-dropper on the Whi-Bal card to correct all images at the same time.

Here's an image from a gym similar to yours. The lights make the upper walls and ceiling where this image was taken look like the same 'pee yellow' color you speak of:

Only corrections made to the shot are WB adjust, lighten shadows a bit, contrast adjustment, sharpen using USM and output to .jpg. Have to keep processing to minimum due to the number of shots taken during a game.

dave

They look great. As long as the player is right, let the rest go.

thanks guys. im going to try and purchase one of those collapsible bounce that is 18% grey on one side and white on the other.

until then im just going to get the best WB on the players and their jerseys and just accept that the rest of the picture can be perfect. i appreciate the help guys

One of the ways I found early on with digital photography back around 2000 was to use paint chip charts from a paint store and have it in one shot from the scene.

Like the top card. I used it outside mostly. If you notice the variations are very slight. Some of the chips are slightly cool and some are slightly warm, the cool ones will warm up the scene and the warm ones will cool the scene. Easy and cheap to make. I also gives you lots of variation so you can get good skin color, all the other colors don't really matter.

The other card is your standard Mcbeth color checker that has been around for at least 75 years. I use it to custom white balance my lights in my studio. I have used it on location when I know the lighting is going to be consistent.

Hope this helps, Michael

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I imported your image from web and then set it to auto. and it whiten up. sharpen denoise the color but nothing else. so you should be able to achieve the same thing in your LR3. that is what I used.

WB indoors. I usually take a picture of the white backboard or my white (ok...dirty gray white ) tennis shoes using "auto" white balance. Then go into the menu and select the picture and set it to the "custom white balance" click ok. then I go ahead and select the custom icon. After that the whites in the picture is fairly close that I rarely have to fix it on import.

no gray cards or sophisticated metering.

hope that helps. it works on my 7d and 50d.

I will second the suggestion from snyderman, I have tried several types of WB gadgets from expodisk to those multi fold out ones and they were all okay but not great the WhiBal card has been the best so far. Since I needed something that I could get a WB using strobes and available light at the college arena I shoot at I gave the Whibal card a try. I did some shots in the paint area, top of the key and other area I tend to shoot at using strobes and then available light at the iso shutter combo for this venue. Now I have pre sets that I apply to those pics as needed.

mcluckie wrote in post #13479481
#5: look at the mercury vapors in the ceiling -- there's a magenta one in the bunch of green or cyan ones.

I have four metal halide lights like those in my workshop. The color change in older bulbs is only slightly annoying for me but I'm generally not trying to take photos there. For photography, it'd be awful. In general they throw off a very clean light but older bulbs do a 10-second 'orange dip' every now and then. The two new bulbs (GE Multi-Vapor 400W) don't do that.

For gyms, it's probably just a question of money. Replacing all of the bulbs in that gym would be $1000 or so (looks like about 60 lamps), and I suspect many schools won't spend for that until the bulbs are actually failing.

AntonLargiader wrote in post #13492394
I have four metal halide lights like those in my workshop. The color change in older bulbs is only slightly annoying for me but I'm generally not trying to take photos there. For photography, it'd be awful. In general they throw off a very clean light but older bulbs do a 10-second 'orange dip' every now and then. The two new bulbs (GE Multi-Vapor 400W) don't do that.

For gyms, it's probably just a question of money. Replacing all of the bulbs in that gym would be $1000 or so (looks like about 60 lamps), and I suspect many schools won't spend for that until the bulbs are actually failing.

Thanks for that tip. I am going to look into the newer lights and see if maybe that would help out in the future when they do replace the lights.

I just meant that the new bulbs aren't doing it [yet]. They might as they age.

However, since those lights were due to be replaced with fluorescents, I did some reading a week or two ago. There are two big things you want in a lamp for good photography. One is obviously the Kelvin temperature but that's not the whole story. If your light is very narrow-spectrum, you don't have the whole color spectrum in there so reflected/absorbed colors won't show up in the correct proportions. That gives you the color cast.

So you also want to look at the Color Rendering Index, or CRI. In very loose terms, this tells you how wide the spectrum is. 75 is OK, 85 is pretty darned good but it gets expensive to make high-CRI bulbs. Cheap 8-ft fluorescents are about $2.50 each, but if you want a high CRI you're going to pay around $10. Look at the cost of season-affective disorder 'sunlight therapy' lamps.

Plus high CRI lamps are less efficient, because they end up creating a lot of light in spectra that don't help us see better.

You need both Kelvin and CRI, because a high-CRI bulb with a low Kelvin still lacks the upper frequencies. Household incandescents are a good example; they are 100 CRI (perfect) by definition but lack the blue end of the spectrum.

The efficiency (lumens per Watt) is also of interest to the person paying the electric bill, so you can''t really expect a small school to convert to studio-grade gym lighting just so you can take better pictures. However, it could very well be that there is a better metal halide bulb that the school can be convinced to migrate to.

Fortunately, the metal halide lights are roughly as efficient as fluorescents, so they are staying in my shop. I do like the light, but they buzz so maybe I can get them changed to newer ballasts. FWIW both systems are in the 60~100 lumen/Watt range.