Color Balance

[grimm]

I do a lot of indoor architectural technology photography for my company and some manufacturers. I've been doing more and more shoots in Vegas where there is so much jazzy lighting and mix between neon, fluorescent, incandescent, and LED lighting. I struggle to get good an accurate color balance/exposure. So I'm looking for some advice.

Below is a shot from a recent trip.


The rows of LED alternate from Green to White. as you can kind of see from the reflection on the floor. I tried to get the white to be white, but in doing so the green is washed out, (this also happens because of the brightness of the LED) besides that the red's are over saturated and the blues are a bit purple. I understand I can adjust every colors levels in post, but I would like to get something closer from the camera.

Anyone have any good pointers?

[Bubba Ho-Tep]

Originally Posted by grimm

I do a lot of indoor architectural technology photography for my company and some manufacturers. I've been doing more and more shoots in Vegas where there is so much jazzy lighting and mix between neon, fluorescent, incandescent, and LED lighting. I struggle to get good an accurate color balance/exposure. So I'm looking for some advice.

Below is a shot from a recent trip.


The rows of LED alternate from Green to White. as you can kind of see from the reflection on the floor. I tried to get the white to be white, but in doing so the green is washed out, (this also happens because of the brightness of the LED) besides that the red's are over saturated and the blues are a bit purple. I understand I can adjust every colors levels in post, but I would like to get something closer from the camera.

Anyone have any good pointers?

Used Kelvin white balance and coooooool that image off.

[Renegade_]

Use 2 layers of separately color balanced versions of the original raw and fight the multitude of color temperatures being thrown at you.

Foreground here is warm, background (the screen) is a bit cool, and all you'd need to do is mask accordingly.

That way the temperature shifts you get while fighting a certain source are minimized to a certain area. Mask as needed.

[BlkWhtTSI]

Could you just manually white balance take a shot, then expose for the screen, and just put the correctly exposed screen into the other image?

[grimm]

In post i'm sure there are many ways to merge photos. I'm looking for suggestions on getting the shot as accurate as possible to avoid merging photos.

[Renegade_]

Originally Posted by grimm

In post i'm sure there are many ways to merge photos. I'm looking for suggestions on getting the shot as accurate as possible to avoid merging photos.

Hmmm... thats the trick I guess. Usually when I get multiple light sources like this I shoot as flat as possible to avoid clipping as much of the color channels as I can in one shot, but again I bring it all back in post. In camera sounds kinda tricky.

Throw a polarizer on it - should start killing some of the extra color glare like you see in this shot.

[grimm]

Originally Posted by Renegade_

Hmmm... thats the trick I guess. Usually when I get multiple light sources like this I shoot as flat as possible to avoid clipping as much of the color channels as I can in one shot, but again I bring it all back in post. In camera sounds kinda tricky.

Throw a polarizer on it - should start killing some of the extra color glare like you see in this shot.

Thanks I had a CP on. colors may have gotten a bit blown out when i exported via lightroom.