Beginner questions .

[slipondajimmy]

Hey everyone.

I have a few questions Im hoping I can get answered. I am shooting items such as small crystals, and jewelry. They are in various shapes, sizes, colors. I am using a Metalight light box as well as a Cannon 10D with a Cannon 50mm Compact macro lens.

No matter what I do I get a green tint when I take photos in the light box.

What is causing this? Im not very good with anything other then a point and shoot camera. So Im not sure of the settings I am using, or what they should be. Any help would be great.

 

[Big Mike]

Welcome to the forum.

What lighting do have to light up the light box? What White balance setting is the camera set to?

My guess would be that your WB is off. It may be that the auto setting isn't doing a good job, or that you inadvertently have it set to incorrectly. The easy solution would be to record your images in RAW format, which would allow you to change the WB setting very easily when you have then shots on your computer.

Alternatively, you could set a custom WB. Check your manual for the exact procedure but basically you place something white under the lighting and take a shot. Then go into the camera menu and set a custom WB using that image.

 

[slipondajimmy]

Thanks for your reply.

IT is currently set up Auto White Balance. The lightbox has Flouresent 5000K lights

Specs of the box can be seen here if needed. http://www.gesswein.com/catalog/products/gischart.jpg . It is the Medalight Large model.


The manual to this camera is 186 pages of fun.

 

[Garbz]

Well that's the problem. Auto white balance doesn't work very well, and fluorescent lights give off the worst colour casts I have seen. For whatever reason they always come up green.

Anyway you have a few options. Either play with the white balance (5000k is daylight so that's a good place to start), or shoot in RAW which allows you to select a white balance in post processing software like camera RAW.

 

[slipondajimmy]

Well I am shooting in Raw now, I tried a manual white balance and it did improve a bit. Im going to post a few examples of the items I am working with here shortly.