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D200 - white balance

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Hi guys,

Although I have been checking this site for years for several camera's, I have not been writing that much. I do have a problem with my new Nikon D200. Somehow I have problems with getting the correct white balance. Or at least, I think it has to do with that. I shoot lots of pictures at hockey games and my favourite teams has a very bright yellow jersey. I am only able to get this yellow quite correct by changing a lot of settings on the camera. I cannot say which settings came closest, but I remember changing White Balance, Tone compensation, saturation and hue. But when I do that, the faces of the players get a horrible color with brown/blue/red variaty. Shouldn't I be able to 'just' use the default setting and use white balance. I do use PRE White Balance and shoot a picture of a white object. I did have a D70 before and it used to work quite fine. Although my new D200 / AFS VR 70-200mm combination is perfect in speed for me, I almost started to feel sorry my D70 'died' two months ago. Can someone advice me? What could be wrong? If I check my pictures, most colors including white look fine .. just the yellow is horrible. I tried to shoot pictures at home (I collect jersey's) but it has the same problem.

Below first two pictures where the yellow is quite like it should be, but the faces are not that great in color. The third picture has really a good vesion of the yellow and because there is no face to see, it is perfect for me. Without changing all the settings and only change the white balance, you will get something like the fourth picture.

More pictures are available at http://www.raymondtellers.nl/icehockey . On the startpage look for the pictures of "Krefeld-Hamburg", "Krefeld-Nürnberg" and "Duisburg-Krefeld". Those have the 'yellow'-problem. There are more pictures of Duisburg, but the colors of them seem to be ok.

Thanks for any advice possible ...







 
Every camera has a different response to each color, so it's not too surprising that these ultra-saturated yellows are different than your D70.

Do you shoot RAW? In Adobe Camera RAW and Lightroom, you have finer control over calibrating individual colors. You could reduce the saturation of just the yellow channel, for example. (You could probably do this in Photoshop on JPEGs too but I don't know how.)

If you shoot JPEG, try using Color Mode II (AdobeRGB) to make sure the yellow channel isn't being clipped.

White balance looks OK to me otherwise (not great, but this stadium lighting looks difficult).

You could try using a MacBeth color calibration card instead of a gray card.
 
The D200 has the best WB metering of any camera I have used (D2x, 30D, 5D, Mark III). Where you are having a problem is with the metal halide light source in the arena. It is a nasty light but our eyes filter it out while at an event. Metal halide also tends to be deficient in output at the red end of the spectrum which also affects skin tones and colors.

If you look at past shots and adjust the WB in Photoshop you can get a good idea of what camera WB setting you should use in the future. You can then manually set the WB Kelvin setting on your camera.

If all your pictures are taken at 3000K for instance and it turns out that the light output was 3800K then it is much easier to do a batch adjustment of all your images from a shoot to the higher setting. If you use AWB you will be making the adjustments images by image.

Pros shooting in arenas will wirelessly trigger remote stobes and this provides them with a much better WB to work with in their images.
 
There is a game tomorrow night, but I probably will not be able to use your information tomorrow already because there is quite some things to test, check out with previous images, etcetera. The next game after tomorrow will be on Sunday already, so till the weekend there is enough time to check out everything you said.

It is not just at the icerink where the yellow is not correct. I have it at home too, but again, it is not in daylight. I am going to use your info for sure. Thank you very much!!! I appreciate it a lot.

Regards, Raymond
 
So far I shoot my pictures in JPEG as I did not have that many memory cards. Now I got an extra 4 GB beside my two 1 GB cards, so RAW is an option to use now! I checked out the two programs you mentioned. I will purchase me both. And I will test the color mode II which you mentioned. Like I answered montereyphoto's comments, there is a game tomorrow night. This setting I can easily switch to. The calibration card must be checked first. It is something new to me. Thanks!! I appreciate your quick reply!
 
Hues and saturation which quite easy to test and did both changing all color channels as well as just yellows and it makes the pictures a lot better! Probably it will be best to combine all your information (hue/saturation, color mode, RAW pictures and the info of montereyphoto. It will be a lot of work afterwards, but if the results will be better, than it is definitelly worth doing. Thanks to you as well!
 
Hi Dave,

It depends on the icerink where I shoot the pictures. In general I try to find a setting where the shutter time is about 1/500 to 1/640 to have best results with little noise (ISO800/1000) and enough light in the picture. Diafragma would be f2.8 to f3.5 in most cases.

I used a D70 before and had far less problems in getting good pictures. As that camera got over 60,000 pictures, it started having problems and stopped working at just over 100,000 shots. I am starting to get worried if the problem in colors in due to myself or the camera. Anyway: I am frustrated at the moment. The colors on the little display of the camera are horrible ... very low coloring. At home the look better, but I cannot rely on the display ... is that a common thing or ???

The last picture in the first posting had the setting below. I have to say that this particular picture was shot about three meters from the boarding of the icerink. Mostly I stand directly at the glass.

Camera: NIKON D200
Resolution: 426 pixels x 640 pixels
Exposure Time: 1/500 sec
F-Number: f 3.2
ISO: 1000
Focal Length: 200 mm
Flash: No Flash
Exposure Program: Manual
Date / Time: 2007:10:28 20:03:02
dave veneri said:
what was your shutter speed? I know the d200 is a bit soft but your
pics seem a little blurry.....
Click to expand...
 
I can only suspect hat the color rendering index of the stadion's lights have to do with it. If there are serious peaks and valleys in their spectral curve, it will be very difficult to get the colors right, and changing one setting influences to get the yellow more or less coorect will mess up the rest.

And don't vorget that your eyes have a different color response than a bayer filter, and that your brain always applies auto white balance.
So what you see is often not wat you get from a digicam.

I also think a flash and a flash amplifier wiill not help you: the color balance may be improved but 1/250 is to slow to stop the action, only a Niko D50/D70 could help you out: with a little trick, you can have them sync at 1/1000

--
cameras don't shoot people
People shoot people.
 
Everything you write makes a lot of sence! I know that it is hard to make the colors be correct in icehalls, but not that hard as it is now. And you are very right about changing settings for the yellow will mess up other parts of the pictures. I had to suffer the consequences for that already. I did some shooting yesterday, mixing not that much which saturation/hue etcetera. Just a little on white balance to see the difference afterwards. I changed the hue on the yellow channel which makes it a better result already. Some pictures could not be changed that good as I changed the white balance at one point to drastically and made the pictures too blue to change. Too bad. In general: it is a lot better. Sunday another game, pick up the best setting so far and continue from there.

I do not use flash light by the way. Will not be possible either, because I am behind glass during the game. So that is not an option anyway.

Thanks a lot guys!

Here are some of the better shots from yesterday:







 
you mention not using flash because of glass....with your camera you could always use the CCL system and fire a flash off camera or better yet use a radio remote to fire it. I think flash would give you a much better image in terms of color and then you could simply expose the ambient to fill the background instead of lighting your subject. Flash would also freeze your subject better and with WB set to flash, the D200 produces really nice colors when the 600 or 800 are used.
 
I just looked in my D200 manual (page 39) and it mentions that you should use a neutral grey (or white) in the lighting that you are taking the pictures in. I would highly recommend a neutral grey card (I've never had success with white). They are less than $10 at any camera store. Shoot it at the game and set it as your preset (I don't think it even has to be in focus, just under the right light). That should make a huge improvement. Also, you really should shoot RAW. This wouldn't even be an issue if you did.
 
I took the liberty of tinkering a little with one photo:



LAB mode in PS2. Using curves;
Increased luminosity contrast.

Tweaked the a and b curves to remove (some) yellow cast from the ice and (some) blue cast from white patches on clothing.
Increase yellow saturation on clothing.

Tried to better skin tones without too much sucess, he actually looks a little jaundiced.
Didn't spend too much time on it and I am no PS expert.

Original:



I second the thought of using a grey card to set WB and shooting in RAW and recommend having a look at LAB mode.

I will immediately remove your pics from my system if it bothers you at all.
--
Phil_L
 
Thanks for the flash info. I am not an official photographer so having placed flashes off the camera, would be no option. You are probably right that it would get better results, but I think flashlights will be difficult. I should be able to get it done in the smaller icerhall with my dutch team though.
 
I will go into the citycenter this afternoon and see if I can get me a grey card! I read about that in the manual too.

Tonight there is a game in the Netherlands that I will visit. Light there is horrible, but shooting RAW is my first test for tonight ... hopefully with the grey card. Thanks!
 
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