580EXII color temperature?

Does anyone know what the color temp of a 580EXII is? or how to figure it out. I have a color temperature meter but it's useless with flash. If I knew, it would be easier to match my speedlights to any situations color temp, I can measure the ambient color temp with my meter and then knowing the kelvin shift from literature, I would be able to apply appropriate gels and not have to experiment and trying to make judgements by looking at the screen on the back of my camera.

Not sure what software you use, but if you shoot a gray card while using the flash and shooting in raw format then you can open it in adobe camera raw and use the white balance eye dropper tool to see what it thinks the balance should be. I assume other programs offer a similar functionality.

I would roughly say 5500-6000

1move wrote in post #9736402
I would roughly say 4000-4300

Supposed to be similar to daylight, around 5000k.

krb wrote in post #9736411
Supposed to be similar to daylight, around 5000k.

Sorry I made a mistake corrected with the right values, its a bit stronger then daylight.

yeah, that sounds about right. It does tend to be a little more blue, now that you mention it. 1/4 CTO gels are good to have around.

From the 580EX user manual...


"When the flash fires, the color temperature information is transmitted to
certain specific EOS digital camera . This feature optimizes the flash picture's
white balance. When the camera's color balance is set to <AWB>or <lightning bolt>, it
will work automatically.
To see if this feature works with your camera, see the white balance
specification in the "Major Specifications' of your camera's instruction
manual ."

My MKIII manual only mentions it if you choose the flash icon when changing from AWB on the screen down low on the back of the camera and the manual lists that setting to be for 6,000 degrees kelvin. There was nothing mentioned in the "Specifications" section of the manual. And yes I've found that 1/4 CTO on the speedlights kind of works when I'm shooting manual exposure, using Elinchrom strobes and 580EXII speedlights with the camera white balance set on 5500 degrees kelvin. The speedlights bare, definitely do look blue compared to the light from the Elinchrom heads.

Jannie, try to read the EXIF data to see if your 1DIII embeds the actual flash Kelvin value into that data...try test shot up close (low power) and far away (full power) to see how the EXIF data varies.

Interesting Wilt, I tried what you said shot tight was 5800, wide 6200 and that was with the camera set on AWB using ETTL on a cable with the key off to the side. But then I chose the flash icon and shot close and wide and got 6500 both times. It reads out the color temperature next to the tint slide bar in the develop section of LR2.

All the images look identical as far as color balance goes to the eye. I think as long as I'm using speedlights and strobes which I have tested before on both 5500 and AWB, I'll just use AWB in the future and not worry about it until I see a problem, it's only once that combining the two lights that it bothered me that the speedlights seemed too cold, maybe the reason it didn't show when I combined lights when on AWB was that it was balancing the color between the two sources and just wasn't noticeable which I have no problem with, if it looks good then I'm good with it.

Thanks!

I routinely have used a 1/8 CTO on my flash for wedding photography for years. The point was not to have cool fill when shooting synchro sun fill. In shooting with Dynalite studio lights, they have typically been a bit warmer than daylight, but for portraiture I liked that. I never tried to mix speedlight and studio lighting, though. I guess I might run a color balance test of daylight, my Metz, and my Dynalites out of curiosity of the difference in warmth, shooting a Colorchecker and using the WB tool in LR to make all three match, and then compare the values in the LR WB slider.

The color temperature of the light from the flash varies, depending upon the battery charge level and when you last took a flash picture. As the flash re-charges after a shot, the color temperature changes quite a lot.

Nikon's SB 900 is a flash which varies tremendously. It's significantly worse than the predecessor, the SB 800. The 580 EX II isn't that bad, but varies, which of course is why the camera manufacturers have built in the automatic white balance adjustment, so that the camera will compensate for this change. It also allows the flash to be faster, since the camera will take care of the side effects of that.
It's another thing that the manufacturer may have aimed for a setting that's a bit above or below what you prefer. That can be fixed with gels.

apersson850 wrote in post #9739256
The color temperature of the light from the flash varies, depending upon the battery charge level and when you last took a flash picture. As the flash re-charges after a shot, the color temperature changes quite a lot.

Nikon's SB 900 is a flash which varies tremendously. It's significantly worse than the predecessor, the SB 800. The 580 EX II isn't that bad, but varies, which of course is why the camera manufacturers have built in the automatic white balance adjustment, so that the camera will compensate for this change. It also allows the flash to be faster, since the camera will take care of the side effects of that.
It's another thing that the manufacturer may have aimed for a setting that's a bit above or below what you prefer. That can be fixed with gels.

I've never found this.. The flash tube draws its power from a capacitor and not the batteries directly.. The capacitor must be fully charged before the flash will fire..

Jannie, I just found this statement on http://dpanswers.com/c​anon_flash.html
"•An E-TTL II Speedlite communicates the colour temperature of the flash to the body. An E-TTL II capable DSLR will use this for the white balance setting whenever the camera is set to Auto WB or Flash WB. (With an E-TTL flash, the camera uses a preset value for Flash WB and Auto WB is computed from the ambient.)"

And amazingly, a Canon 'white paper' about the 20D discloses flash color temp reporting!

worst case, you can always shoot a gray target. You can't really say one temp from one unit to the next with *complete* precision as there is some modicum of variance. I suppose that's why the flash tells the camera what temp it is firing off