Shooting Under Tungstens

[The23rdman]

Shooting people with off camera flash do you set your camera to tungsten and CTO gel your flash or do a CWB with a CTO?

 

[tdodd]

To date I have not used gels when mixing flash and tungsten ambient light. Often the results are perfectly OK, especially when bouncing the flash and ending up with a fairly even mix of light temperature, which can be tweaked in post. I only shoot raw so WB adjustment is easy enough after the event.

However, there have been times when my subject has caught too much "blue" from the flash and it has been impossible to colour balance the whole scene within Lightroom or DPP. Maybe in Photoshop separate adjustments could be made using layers, but I avoid Photoshop.

I have not tried it yet but, funnily enough, today I shall be shooting with CTO gels for the first time, in an environment of tungsten ambient light. I expect the resulting shots to be far easier to WB and simply using the tungsten preset ought to get me in the ballpark from the off.

I would say that if you have the option for gels, or a coloured Omnibounce type diffuser then use them and you'll make your life simpler.

 

[HoppyUK]

Gelling the flash is not necessarily an off-camera thing - it's when you need to balance the colour of the flash with the ambient.

I didn't use to bother, as the main subject always comes out okay without, and the background just goes a bit orange. Often not a problem and as Tim says if you bounce the flash there will be less pure ambient in the background anyway. However, the flash is then coloured by the bounce surface/s if it's not pure white, and often it's not.

TBH I like the background to be a bit warm. It usually suits the environment and atmosphere of the pic - social groups usually for me. However, I shot a few recently where the background was getting on for red and that was just too much so I now use a half CTO, custom white balance it to get me somewhere close and then tweak in post.

If you are bouncing the flash, I find that the colour of the bounce surface/s varies quite a bit shot to shot as you move around, so unless you can do a custom balance before every shot, go Raw and do the fine tuning in post.

 

[The23rdman]

Gelling the flash is not necessarily an off-camera thing - it's when you need to balance the colour of the flash with the ambient.

Aye, I know that.

I didn't use to bother, as the main subject always comes out okay without, and the background just goes a bit orange. Often not a problem and as Tim says if you bounce the flash there will be less pure ambient in the background anyway. However, the flash is then coloured by the bounce surface/s if it's not pure white, and often it's not.

bounce isn't an option due to the ceiling colour. They already had an issue with colour casting in their last shoot. I'm not planning on making the same mistake hence my question.

TBH I like the background to be a bit warm. It usually suits the environment and atmosphere of the pic - social groups usually for me. However, I shot a few recently where the background was getting on for red and that was just too much so I now use a half CTO, custom white balance it to get me somewhere close and then tweak in post.

If you are bouncing the flash, I find that the colour of the bounce surface/s varies quite a bit shot to shot as you move around, so unless you can do a custom balance before every shot, go Raw and do the fine tuning in post.

Yep, well, I always shoot RAW anyway so will have some wiggle room. The problem is the ambient light is quite dark. I'm hoping they'll let me turn the dimmers right up to avoid the red colour from dimmed tungsten.

 

[HoppyUK]

Yep, well, I always shoot RAW anyway so will have some wiggle room. The problem is the ambient light is quite dark. I'm hoping they'll let me turn the dimmers right up to avoid the red colour from dimmed tungsten.

If colour balance is critical, you might have to do some trials with different strength CTO gels. As you say, tungsten on a dimmer goes red.

If the light is mainly ambient, or mainly flash you can usually sort that in post. It's when you mix the two that you have to be careful and balance them up as closely as you possibly can. Correcting two colour casts in post processing is impossible.

There was another thread about colour a few days ago and I think that colour balance is subjective. What is technically right doesn't always look right, and vice versa. I think that if you concentrate on getting the main subject right then the background doesn't need to be absolutely perfect in colour, and actually might look a bit cold if it was.

 

[The23rdman]

Thanks, Richard, that's prety much what I was going to go with. The issue with the first shoot was colour cast on the people. I'm only using flash for the portrait shots anyway, so I think I can keep flash as my main light source for those and nail it.

 

[HoppyUK]

Sorry if I'm teaching you to suck eggs, but this is how I'd do it.

Do three shots with CTO 1/4, 1/2 and full gels, custom white balancing each time until it 'looks' right. This will get the flash/ambient colour as near as you reasonably can, and give you a very close to perfect JPEG and working image on the LCD. You will also need to experiment a bit to get the exposure balance just right with foreground/background balance just the right brightness levels.

Then for each set up, shoot the first pic with a Kodak grey card in frame, in the area of the main subject. If that's people, just get them to hold it. In post, use that as your dropper reference and you can't go wrong.

 

[The23rdman]

Sorry if I'm teaching you to suck eggs, but this is how I'd do it.

Do three shots with CTO 1/4, 1/2 and full gels, custom white balancing each time until it 'looks' right. This will get the flash/ambient colour as near as you reasonably can, and give you a very close to perfect JPEG and working image on the LCD. You will also need to experiment a bit to get the exposure balance just right with foreground/background balance just the right brightness levels.

Then for each set up, shoot the first pic with a Kodak grey card in frame, in the area of the main subject. If that's people, just get them to hold it. In post, use that as your dropper reference and you can't go wrong.

Teach away! I'm basically working from all I've learnt at Strobist, but this will be the first time I've had to do this in anger under tricky conditions.

I don't have a grey card though and doubt I'll have time to pick one up in the morning. Can I do this, or a close as damn it, with a white card? Surely if I can get the histogram to show a nice solid wedge down the middle it'll be the same as a grey card?

 

[HoppyUK]

Teach away! I'm basically working from all I've learnt at Strobist, but this will be the first time I've had to do this in anger under tricky conditions.

I don't have a grey card though and doubt I'll have time to pick one up in the morning. Can I do this, or a close as damn it, with a white card? Surely if I can get the histogram to show a nice solid wedge down the middle it'll be the same as a grey card?

White card is fine, so long as it is clean plain white, and you don't over-expose it and blow it off the histogram (enable blinkies, over-exposure warning, on the LCD).

Anything neutral in colour will do with equal quantities of red, green and blue. So plain white or any kind of neutral grey. The advantage of 18% grey is that it also gives you an exposure reference at the same time.

 

[The23rdman]

Excellent, thank you.