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Lights, Strobes, and Lighting Technique / Archived topic

Strobe FG/BG White Balance?

Started by bkkchriss4 ·

  • 2Posts
  • 2Replies

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Strobe FG/BG White Balance?

2 posts
  1. First off. This is my first round shooting wide angle with the new DSLR rig, so hang in there with me, somewhat of a learning curve.

     

    Shooting 10-17 with 2x Z240's optical in manual. I was using Lee 444 filters on the strobes shooting in relatively clear blue water in Thailand.

     

    What I was noticing is that my JPGs straight from the camera were coming out with a pretty balanced foreground flash exposed WB and a pretty nice blue background. They were a bit over saturated, but thats just the setting on the camera for the internal color correcting as I have set.

     

    Now on the RAW files, what I was noticing was on shots that the foreground had good flash exposure the overall image seemed to come out the way I expected, however the images that had less than perfect UNDER exposure (quite a few :() on the foreground were coming out with a much much more severe green shift on the image, especially on the background water. Would this be a result of the WB trying to compensate for the underexposed fg but with the strobe filters affecting the WB on both the bg & fg because of my poor fg exposure?

     

    I need plenty more time to play around shooting with the DSLR... but this was my first big question on the technical side. I didn't remember to test shooting wide angle without the Lee 444's to see what, if any, difference showed up...

  2. The difference between "native" strobe and filtered strobe light is usually pretty subtle (I use a very soft straw filter in tropical water), but the difference between RAW and jpeg can be pretty dramatic. Although I use CS4 to process my images, I would say that Aperture and Nikon Capture are better at matching RAW and jpeg files' appearance (or easier to use).

     

    Inon strobes do give a green cast to the water when the image is colour-balanced for the foreground strobe exposure as their colour temperature is a bit high.

     

    Alex Mustard has a good article:

     

    http://www.amustard.com/?page=pro&ext=...news&size=s

     

    Tim

     

    :(

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