sports hall lighting

[clarky49]

hi,

was wondering if you could help me this is my first post on here, i recently did a shoot in a sports hall and the lighting was horrible sent all my pictures orange, i was wondering what white balance to set my camera to in the future to counteract this and how i can sort these images out in photoshop?

thanks clarky

 

[Ally]

The besy thing you can do is set your white balance incamera at the lowest kelvin tempeture e.g. 2800K or if you haven't got that use the halorgon (spelling mmmm?) setting. In photoshop look at the image bar and go into colour balance, use the red bar to decrease and the highlights, midtone and shadows.

 

[Garry Edwards]

Settng the white balance to halogen may not work because the lighting may be something other than halogen, or may be a combination of various sources. The only safe bet is to set a custom white balance (read your camera instruction book to find out how) or shoot in raw format and correct it on computer.

This isn't really a lighting question but it would be better (if possible) to use a lighting solution. The problem with not using lighting is that there probably isn't a great deal of light available, so you'll be struggling with very high ISO, very large apertures and long shutter speeds, none of which will help with the quality and which is a bad idea for moving subjects anyway.

Even a couple of hotshoe flashes will help, and will freeze he action, but hotshoe flashes typically output no more than 60 Joules, so they don't have a lot of power, especially when they're diffused. If possible, it would be better to use a couple of 500 Joule flashes (say Elinchrom or Bowens) which would produce a much better result, or at least would produce a good result much more easily.

 

[steveophoto]

I have had this issue before and the only reall way is to use a CTO get on the lighting to try and get it a similar temp to the ambient light then set the WB low. Otherwise you get a white lit subject with an orange background!

 

[Garry Edwards]

I have had this issue before and the only reall way is to use a CTO get on the lighting to try and get it a similar temp to the ambient light then set the WB low. Otherwise you get a white lit subject with an orange background!

Yes, this is the best answer, but it's only reliable if the lighting is consistent - for example if the shoot starts off with some daylight coming in to affect the overall colour balance and ends in darkness, you'll need to get the colour temperature meter out (or fiddle with a laptop) as the light changes. The problem is, sometimes there just isn't time.

 

[Chappers]

I think Garrys suggestion to shoot RAW would be the best option when you don't know what the lighting conditions are, or are going to be variable It also means that you also capture more data so if the exposure is a bit off you can always recovery it latter.