# Photography Question



## monokitty (Jan 26, 2002)

To the many photography experts on this forum, question for you:

How do you shoot in an underground parking garage with orange lighting, without causing your entire photo to turn out orange and red? (i.e; you're trying to preserve the grey coloured walls and yellow markings.)

I'm thinking I'm missing a setting on my D40 and that I don't need a special lens. Thanks..


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## The Doug (Jun 14, 2003)

If the garage is lit by those high-pressure sodium bulbs, you could try setting a custom white balance on your D40 but you may never get satisfactory results. I hate those lights.

Convert the image to black & white.


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## Max (Sep 26, 2002)

Yeah... convert. It's probably going to look more interesting that way, anyway. Those sodium lights really know how to kill the party.


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## monokitty (Jan 26, 2002)

Damn. Thanks guys.


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## kps (May 4, 2003)

Custom white balance like Doug suggests or set it for tungsten and hope for a miracle. You'll still need to post process for colour correction.

Not sure if you can set custom WB on the D40, so check your user manual. To do that, you take a shot of a white card under those lights and select the image in the camera's browser, then tell the camera that it should interpret that as pure white.

Good luck.


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## eMacMan (Nov 27, 2006)

Turn off the flash so everything is more or less the same colour. 

After that I just let the auto functions do the best they can, then use PhotoShop (PS Elements is more than adequate) to get as good a final balance as is reasonably possible.

That said those Sodium lamps are missing huge chunks of the colour spectrum so don't expect miracles.


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## FeXL (Jan 2, 2004)

Shoot in RAW, include an 18% grey card or white balance card (even a sheet of good luster or glossy printer paper will ballpark it) in one image, process that image in Camera Raw, record your settings, use the settings from the grey card image to process your keeper.

You should be able to preserve the integrity of the grey walls and the yellow stripes where the sodium light falls, but the white balance will be off a bit wherever there are shadows and other light sources falling. This may be handled with further processing of those areas, depending on how difficult it is to isolate those elements. Then again, if they aren't large areas of the photo, just leave them,

You may be able to cross-process the image & end up with something where the white balance doesn't even matter much.

Sounds like an interesting challenge. I wouldn't write off just trying it, you won't learn if you don't try.


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## RiceBoy (Aug 1, 2009)

I've found that shooting in RAW and then post-processing, miracles can sometimes happen. I've had shots that were so washed out, colour casted, or dark that I thought they were total write offs. But with some rather extreme adjustments in Aperture, to my surprise, I was able to bring proper balanced colour and detail back that one would never know just how bad the original was.


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## eMacMan (Nov 27, 2006)

RiceBoy said:


> I've found that shooting in RAW and then post-processing, miracles can sometimes happen. I've had shots that were so washed out, colour casted, or dark that I thought they were total write offs. But with some rather extreme adjustments in Aperture, to my surprise, I was able to bring proper balanced colour and detail back that one would never know just how bad the original was.


This is true even with jpg. As long as part of the image is not washed out there is an amazing amount of detail that can brought out from images that are underexposed or even where part of the image is almost black.

PhotoShop is your friend.


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## Guest (May 17, 2011)

eMacMan said:


> This is true even with jpg. As long as part of the image is not washed out there is an amazing amount of detail that can brought out from images that are underexposed or even where part of the image is almost black.
> 
> PhotoShop is your friend.


Not even close between jpg and RAW. You can do some things with jpg, you can do a LOT of work if it's RAW based. I see jpg proponents argue this all the time but there's really just no comparison to editing between the two. Also RAW editing, in the right application, is completely non-destructive.


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## Niteshooter (Aug 8, 2008)

I think it will greatly depend on your exposure. If it ain't there you ain't going to recover anything.... 

Also depends on what it is you are trying to shoot in the underground. If it's a car I might consider lighting the shot but then I have a portable studio lighting kit. That might not fix funky colours in the background though.

Many digital cameras are pretty good at averaging out the overall white balance of a shot and some are pretty dreadful at it. So it could depend again on what you are using, the DSLR's I shoot with are typically pretty good, but when you get a weird mix of lighting all bets are off. FeXL mentions using a grey card and that could also help for exposure or the palm of your hand, though what you would really need is a colour chart. Kodak and Macbeth both sold them and they are something that studio photographers would include in their photos so basically when the photos are being enhanced you set a white point and then the black point off the patchs as long as the card is part of the same lighting setup. Though this sometimes isn't foolproof either.

If your camera can do a custom white balance try taking a reading off of a white card or sheet of paper though again my gut feeling is that you may wind up having to do some tweaking after the fact.


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