Too much red with Canon 6D, 7D and strobes

I've been experience an issue with both my 6D and 7D with too much red in skin tones whenever I use strobes, mostly AB 1600 and AB800 but also with and old excalibur 1600. I always shoot RAW.
Please note that I've tried custom wb, also shooting with a gray card trying to use that for color balance in post. Not much luck with either. I can manage to correct the color in Adobe Camera RAW using a combination of HSL/Grayscale Saturation and White Balance but it is a pain. The higher the balance of strobe to ambient the more red in the picture.
Please note that this is NOT a question about correcting in post but a question of why so much red when using strobes with the Canon bodies. I have used a variety of different lens so that is not a factor.

Thanks for any input. I'm hoping that the image I tried to attach shows up. Its a straight conversion from RAW to jpg.

Looks ok to me, on my uncalibrated work PC. What do you calibrate your monitor with, and what kind of monitor is it? How do the prints look?

Prints look red if I don't correct. I calibrate my monitor to my labs prints and have a profile just for that.

Sounds to me like your flash temperature is not matched to your camera. Set appropriate K in WB, or dial in some blue shift. I'd try blue shift first. I don't know how you would test the temperature of your flash output.

If you're shooting with a strobe at low power you may be getting a bit of magenta shift. I find that with portrait it tends to leave the skin a bit magenta even after correcting WB. You can use a ColorChecker Passport to profile the lights from the shot to ensure correct colors, or you can correct the skin tones in post.

http://help.smugmug.co​m …mer/portal/arti​cles/93363

Not all strobes are perfect, the power of the strobe may vary the temperature, and the mix of flash and ambient will change how things work. Your only option is to use white balance and tint to correct it - you can probably do this as a batch for each image where the flash/ambient ratio doesn't vary.

movingex wrote in post #17762223
I've been experience an issue with both my 6D and 7D with too much red in skin tones whenever I use strobes, mostly AB 1600 and AB800 but also with and old excalibur 1600. I always shoot RAW.
Please note that I've tried custom wb, also shooting with a gray card trying to use that for color balance in post. Not much luck with either. I can manage to correct the color in Adobe Camera RAW using a combination of HSL/Grayscale Saturation and White Balance but it is a pain. The higher the balance of strobe to ambient the more red in the picture.
Please note that this is NOT a question about correcting in post but a question of why so much red when using strobes with the Canon bodies. I have used a variety of different lens so that is not a factor.

Thanks for any input. I'm hoping that the image I tried to attach shows up. Its a straight conversion from RAW to jpg.

Hosted photo: posted by movingex in
./showthread.php?p=177​62223&i=i4639969
forum: General Photography Talk

Lots of questions that need to be answered first. What WB setting are you using? Does it do this with every person you shoot or just this one? How far are your strobes from your subject? Are you using a diffuser like a soft box on your lights? I shoot models under strobes for a living and different skin tones will for sure produce a different look under my ABs. I never really get red though.

What WB setting are you using? Have used custom WB and Auto
Does it do this with every person you shoot or just this one? Every, the darker the skin = more red
How far are your strobes from your subject? - Doesn't matter
Are you using a diffuser like a soft box on your lights - Umbrellas - Shoot through & reflective, softboxes, beauty dishes.....

movingex wrote in post #17763864
What WB setting are you using? Have used custom WB and Auto
Does it do this with every person you shoot or just this one? Every, the darker the skin = more red
How far are your strobes from your subject? - Doesn't matter
Are you using a diffuser like a soft box on your lights - Umbrellas - Shoot through & reflective, softboxes, beauty dishes.....

Id stay far away from auto anything with strobes because AWB ranges anywhere from 3000-7000k. Try one of the cooler settings like daylight and/or customize your picture style setting by dropping the saturation.

i took the image into photoshop and looked at the color values of the skin tones.

they are too magenta.

movingex wrote in post #17762223
I've been experience an issue with both my 6D and 7D with too much red in skin tones whenever I use strobes, mostly AB 1600 and AB800 but also with and old excalibur 1600. I always shoot RAW.
Please note that I've tried custom wb, also shooting with a gray card trying to use that for color balance in post. Not much luck with either. I can manage to correct the color in Adobe Camera RAW using a combination of HSL/Grayscale Saturation and White Balance but it is a pain. The higher the balance of strobe to ambient the more red in the picture.
Please note that this is NOT a question about correcting in post but a question of why so much red when using strobes with the Canon bodies. I have used a variety of different lens so that is not a factor.

i've never actually played with the Adobe Camera RAW dialog, so perhaps this is completely irrelevant, but I have found that in LR, at the very bottom of the develop dialogs, I believe there's a "Camera Calibration" or something. if you choose the default, being Adobe something, then your pictures will look sometimes drastically different, with reds accentuated. i don't know if there is a similar choice in the Adobe RAW dialog, but if it's there you need to choose a different conversion option.

edit: did a little googling, and it does look like there's the same thing in your dialog. check this out:

http://help.adobe.com …a2-A625-A87156D488A3.html

you don't want to leave it on the default.

Have you tried to shoot some test shots using WB bracketing? It could help you nail down exactly the look you are going for perhaps. I never use WB bracketing, but it would provide some very good in-camera tweaking. I could have used it yesterday though, I had to take some staff pictures, and in one area, we had 4 different light sources (small amount of natural, wall spot lights hitting a bright orange wall, can lights, and a flash). I had to find the WB in the raw later. I could have spent time to offset beforehand using WB bracketing.

http://www.p4pictures.​com …nce-shift-and-bracketing/