Problems with WB and focusing at Thanksgiving

I usually shoot landscapes and buildings in bright sunlight. Yesterday was my first day shooting indoors in various kinds of light and outdoors in the dark. I had two problems.

There were various tones and intensities of incandescent and florescent light inside the house (kitchen vs. dining room vs. living room). Needless to say, WB was all over the place. Should a person try every WB setting on the camera in each room first to see how the camera is handling each? Or, is this a white card situation (I only know white cards exist, not how to use them.) This whole situation taught me to not forget my bounce flash but I'd appreciate any other suggestions about how to correct the WB problem.

Next, a couple wanted pictures taken outdoors in the dark against tree branches covered in little white lights. I was using auto focus assist but found when looking at the pictures that the camera was focusing on the lights rather than the people. And, since the lights were behind the people, it was hard to see exactly where the camera was focusing. And since it was so dark, the lens (Tamron 17-50 f2.8 VC) was open all the way so DOR was very narrow. How do I get around this problem?

Thanks.

You are asking about two situations:

1) Varying lighting. The easy way is to use flash indoors and have your WB set to flash. Would I recommend? Not really, flash use is visible on the pic and do not render the 'mood'. Best option; the one you described. Use a white card. How does it work? you need to set your cam to Manual WB, manual focus, point it a to white piece of paper and press the shutter. That's it.. ( you can repeat the operation as many times as you want if the lighting is too different from one room to another.

2) this problem is linked to the exposure mode you are selecting. If you select matrix metering, the camera will adjust the whole pic to the brightest source ( in the case you described to the lights behind the people). Therefore your subject will be dark...How to get around?

Select center weighted metering or spot metering in your cam and focus with your center focus point on your subject ( here the people). The camera understand that the exposure is determined by the light on these people ( and not the brightest element in the viewfinder).

Hope this helps. Otherwise let us know..
Cheers
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Younes ( Paris, FR)
K100D, 70-300,18-55

Your first problem of indoor lighting/white balance is common. There isn't one answer and I doubt, based on your style of photography, that you will want to fuss around with white cards and changing settings all the time. That kinda takes away the spontaneity of the occassion.

Here's how I shoot in this situation. It may not be your choice but it works for me. I set wb to auto. Most shots are warm but easily fixed if you prefer less warmth. If I do use flash, I leave wb on auto and bounce the flash as well as cover it with one of those light domes to further disperse the light.

Outside, as the another poster recommended, use center weighted metering or spot. Take your meter reading from the subject and lock it in then you can recompose and get the shot you want. I would also set the auto focus area to center point and adjust the camera to lock in as well. You can set the camera from one of its menus to lock both metering and focus at the same time.

Good luck and enjoy making pictures.
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ADDEMUP

Younes and Addemup,

Thanks for the advice. Both of your suggestions make sense to me. I'll have a good chance to put your suggestions into practice when Christmas comes around.

Jim

WB

In those cases where you have multilple lighting condition, there is no way that the camera will be able effectively be accurate on every shot. It is inevitable that you will have to adjust the WB in photoshop after the fact to obtain the look that you want on each image.

The best thing to do is set the WB to AUTO and shoot RAW. This way you let the camera do the best that it can and then you can fine tune the WB on the RAW file to perfection.

Focusing in the dark against a bright light head on = bad recepie.

That is when you tell everbody, why don't every move to where I am and I move to where you all are so that the light on back can help illuminate all of you instead of the available light working against the camera.

If it is not possible to switch position, then I just try to move around myself to change the angle in such a way that the bright light is not on the frame, you will might get some glare, but everything else will be much accurate if the spot light is not on the frame...

Last but not least, always give manual focus a chance... At times it is the best way!

jmbass said:

I usually shoot landscapes and buildings in bright sunlight. Yesterday was my first day shooting indoors in various kinds of light and outdoors in the dark. I had two problems.

There were various tones and intensities of incandescent and florescent light inside the house (kitchen vs. dining room vs. living room). Needless to say, WB was all over the place. Should a person try every WB setting on the camera in each room first to see how the camera is handling each? Or, is this a white card situation (I only know white cards exist, not how to use them.) This whole situation taught me to not forget my bounce flash but I'd appreciate any other suggestions about how to correct the WB problem.

Next, a couple wanted pictures taken outdoors in the dark against tree branches covered in little white lights. I was using auto focus assist but found when looking at the pictures that the camera was focusing on the lights rather than the people. And, since the lights were behind the people, it was hard to see exactly where the camera was focusing. And since it was so dark, the lens (Tamron 17-50 f2.8 VC) was open all the way so DOR was very narrow. How do I get around this problem?

Thanks.

Click to expand...

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http://cloud.prohosting.com/~poder2k/photography

Thanks, Maney.

Actually, I'm shooting in raw and jpeg-fine. However, I don't have the $900 to buy Photoshop. Can you recommend a cheaper program that I could use to correct WB? Thanks.

Jim

Hi

The applications I am aware of for inexpensively editing WB in JPEGs are Windows (Vista) Photo Gallery, Picasa (free download) and Photoshop Elements. If you are using RAW, you can use Elements 5 or higher.

****
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http://s60.photobucket.com/albums/h40/rclarkphotos/?albumview=grid

Nikon View NX is the best raw processor and will deliver all camera settings. All other programs just guess at the settings. This program is FREE . Photoshop elements is the poor man's solution to 95% of the Photoshop functions you need and costs between $80 and $100.

The top two links in my signature lines below tell a lot about exposure and white balance.

Leon
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http://www.leongoodman.com/balance
http://www.leongoodman.com/expose
http://www.leongoodman.com/d70focusnew.html
http://www.pbase.com/photoleon
http://www.leongoodman.com

Well,

If you are editing images for print and to be blown up, I would recommend anything adobe. The reason being is because Adobe is the only brand that cause the least amount of damage to the original image in terms of degradation. So, if you are on a budget, specially now for Black Friday, you could easily find a copy of Photoshop Elements for $50. Although Elements doesn't have all the functions of regular photoshop, it does possess the same built quality when it comes to preserving image quality. I highly recommend photo shop element.

If you can't afford $50 or if all your images are not going to be printed, just to be display on the web or the screen, then I would highly recommend IRFAN VIEW which is FREE. I actually use irfanview more then anything else because it is so practical and easy to use. Below is a screen shot of how you would correct WB on irfanview.

Now, what were you shooting, people or objects. Realize the you not only get a color cast due to the lighting indoors, but actually each camera manufacturer, canon, Nikon, etc, they all each introduce their trademark color cast for which you need to be aware.

For example, Nikon likes to be bias towards the Blue/Red or Magenta.
Canon likes to be bias towards the green/yellow or Cyan.

If you are shooting dark color skin people, Nikon is better because dark color skin looks better with a magenta tone. It doesn't matter much with light color skin because it is easier to correct a color cast.

Irfanview, as you can see it is easy to use with the slider...
When I shoot Canon, usually what I do is decrease green, and saturation.

When I shoot Nikon I hardly have to correct WB, acceptable result out of the box.



Here is photoshop elements which is worth the $50.

jmbass said:

Thanks, Maney.

Actually, I'm shooting in raw and jpeg-fine. However, I don't have the $900 to buy Photoshop. Can you recommend a cheaper program that I could use to correct WB? Thanks.

Jim

Click to expand...

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http://cloud.prohosting.com/~poder2k/photography

jmbass said:

Thanks, Maney.

Actually, I'm shooting in raw and jpeg-fine. However, I don't have the $900 to buy Photoshop.

Click to expand...

Actually you can get the full retail version of Photoshop CS3 for under $200 off Ebay.

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Lora

I've been on Dpreview since June 2006. Unfortunately, some posting history has been lost along the way...

PhotoLeon1935 said:

Photoshop elements is the poor man's solution to 95% of the Photoshop functions you need and costs between $80 and $100.

Click to expand...

Elements is maybe 85% of Photoshop, still a tremendous deal.
--
Lora

I've been on Dpreview since June 2006. Unfortunately, some posting history has been lost along the way...

Thanks, Lora.

I usually stay away from buying software on eBay because there is a good chance that it is pirated.

I have a copy of Photoshop Elements 6 that I bought about 2 years ago but never installed it. I upgraded my laptop to Windows 7 and then tried to install PE 6. It installed fine but won't run. I wrote to Adobe asking for help but of course they didn't reply.

I'm a little miffed at Adobe not only because of the lack of a reply but also because they don't seem in any hurry to upgrade their software. They didn't have an upgrade of their Flash Player for IE 8 (64 bit edition) for at least a year after IE 8 was released even though more and more computers were coming out with 64 bit systems and a lot of software will now run on 64 bit systems.

I'm probably going to have to buy PE but I'd sure like to find a comparable program for around the same price.

Well sir, if you are mad at adobe and would like to bio-cot adobe, you will be in a bit of bind... The closest thing that I could recommend would be Paint Shop Pro, which I started using in 1999 and which joint forces with Corel Draw back in mid 2000s.

I loved Paint Shop, it does a lot for the money, it has way more and better features then Elements, but again, will degrade image quality more then any Adobe software.

Once you go Adobe and you see the results, there is no coming back...

jmbass said:

Thanks, Lora.

I usually stay away from buying software on eBay because there is a good chance that it is pirated.

I have a copy of Photoshop Elements 6 that I bought about 2 years ago but never installed it. I upgraded my laptop to Windows 7 and then tried to install PE 6. It installed fine but won't run. I wrote to Adobe asking for help but of course they didn't reply.

I'm a little miffed at Adobe not only because of the lack of a reply but also because they don't seem in any hurry to upgrade their software. They didn't have an upgrade of their Flash Player for IE 8 (64 bit edition) for at least a year after IE 8 was released even though more and more computers were coming out with 64 bit systems and a lot of software will now run on 64 bit systems.

I'm probably going to have to buy PE but I'd sure like to find a comparable program for around the same price.

Click to expand...

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http://cloud.prohosting.com/~poder2k/photography

Maney, thanks again for the good advice. Adobe is not going to care one wit about me buying or not buying their program. And, I've actually been a big fan of Adobe from before it ever made imaging software. Just had to vent a little about their recent activities, or more accurately, their non-activity.

I'm off to some stores to see if I can get PE for a decent price. Otherwise, I'll order it on-line. Of course, there could be a miracle and Adobe could actually answer my question about PE6 running on Windows 7. Naw.

Jim