poor lighting, solutions?

This was taken after dark, in a park area that had those crummy yellow energy-efficient lights. I didn't use a flash. Any ideas on how I could have made a better exposure?

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I used a levels adjustment layer, and a hue and saturation layer in PS to get to this:

Next time:

1) use a flash if possible.
2) if no flash, increase the ISO (here it was 800 - depending upon your camera, you may be able to go to 1600 or even 3200).
3) set the white balance properly for the lighting (tungsten or incandescent in this case).
4) if you do not have an IS lens (image stabilizing) or some such function on the camera, use a tripod or steady yourself against a wall or column and tuck your arms against your side to stabilize the camera to counter the long shutter speed necessary for the low light. You can also try to open the aperture if possible (although here it looks like it was full open at 1.8 ), but this will affect your DOF and may throw parts of the subject out of focus.
5) in low light, the AF may not be able to lock properly, so you may need to focus manually - some hotshoe flash units (Canon Speedlights, for example) may help you with AF assist beams.
6) shooting RAW may also help with post-processing adjustment.

Good luck - a lot of us have been there with this shot for sure.

Kirk

In addition to Kirkts' great advice:

Good points - you were using your nifty, wide open.
Bad points - Your shutter speed was 1/20, way to slow unless you were on a tripod. Looks like the focus has locked onto the candle, try a different focus technique.

You were using a 350d, you could have gotten another stop by racking the ISO upto 1600.

Under the kind of lighting you were under the only safe way to get the color balance right is to shoot a gray card and use it for a Custom White Balance following the procedure for your camera. Barring that, the least you can do is shoot RAW so that the Color Temperature and Tint can be corrected under better conditions.

Thanks all for the information. I did recently switch over to shooting RAW only. Probably just because I'm a control freak. Hawkeye did do a better job of removing most of the yellow haze. Seems I need to buy a gray card and throw it away as soon as I calibrate my palm!

I thought that calibrating your palm (nice expression btw) was for exposure, not colour balance?

I can see placing a gray card in front of the birthday cake while everyone is singing and the baby wants to grab a handful of icing as being a great party stunt! Good luck with that.

Kirk

JoYork wrote in post #6239616
I thought that calibrating your palm (nice expression btw) was for exposure, not colour balance?

You are quite correct. This is a situation in which one of the dual purposes of the 18% Gray Card has been mis-applied. Gray cards are used both for color balance problems and for placing a Zone V exposure. The former is concerned primarily that there is no color cast, whereas the latter depends upon tonal value or brightness of the 18% grey card.

If you are trying to get a perfect color balance in your scene, the Custom White Balance feature in the camera can do that for you.

*************Gray Card***************
Tutorial on Use of the Gray Card for Exposure and White Balance:
http://www.zaffora.com​/W9DMK/GrayCardTutoria​l.htm
or the downloadable PDF version:
http://www.zaffora.com​/W9DMK/GrayCardTutoria​l.pdf

Your biggest problem (aside from the obviously horrible white balance) is that you completely missed the focus. The hand on the candle is perfectly in focus, and the child is just blurry background.

DragonDan wrote in post #6233185

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full size pic at:Clicky piccy

I took a different tact. Opened in CS3, cropped the image down, selected this leetle angel's head and did some USM sharpening. Then saved as TIFF, Opened in LR1.4, I adjusted vibrance and saturation, adjusted clarity then ADDED the vignetting (both sliders all the way to the LEFT.)

Not sure if it's the look you wanted but I just thought I would have a whack at salvaging this pic...

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Convert it to B&W...

It is.
Need an exposure crutch?

Great. You have what looks like a white tray there that you could try to use to correct the WB. Thing is, the "Correct" WB may not be the "Right" WB for a image. Remember, you're the judge of your own image, & people expect that an image using a candle flame will be on the warm side of "Correct".

Focus on the eyes next time. Your shot puts focus on the candle and detracts from the subject.

You did right not to use flash. Flash would have killed the effect from the candle and glow on the subjects face. The suggested crop and white balance makes a perfect picture.

Here is my take at it my take on your photo. I hope you like. I thought it would look better in black & white.