One friend came to my house with his newly acquired Nikon D90 DSLR camera. He pushed the LiveView button on the back and showed me the scene of my living room on the LCD screen of the camera. The scene looked yellow-reddish overall, just as I expected because of the mixed incandescent and compact fluorescent artificial lighting in the room. My friend commented that he liked the warm and fuzzy colors on the screen. He then proceeded to take a photo, and showed me the image in which the yellow-reddish color was significantly reduced. His comment was that the photo’s color looked worse. He then popped up the flash and took another shot. The yellow-reddish color was completely gone. The photo looked like one taken in bright daylight. The comment from him? The color was bad! Read More…
Different light sources have different color temperatures. The lower color temperatures are associated with longer wavelengths (redder) while higher color temperatures are associated with shorter wavelength (more blue). Unlike human, camera cannot intelligently decipher the scene it sees and tell what is white and what is not. Therefore, to make sure white is really white, we need to correct the color of the photo to remove the color cast from the light source. This is typically a straight forward procedure if there is a uniform and consistent light illuminating the scene. However it will be challenging if there are mixed lights of different temperatures (colors). This is actually quite common for landscape photography. Not only the light from the Sun has different colors at different time of the day but also the color of light is modified by clouds or the shade. To illustrate the problems, please see the following different versions of the same photo with different white balance settings. Read More…
I ran across this post on DPReview and thought it could be useful for other Nikon D300 users. It sure sounds like a great technique for JPG shooters. If you shoot RAW, you should be able to do similar adjustment on your computer in post processing.
