Indoor Lighting Experiment

[Raddy]

I have been curious recently about the GE "Reveal" lightbulbs (which are supposed to give truer light and improve colors) and how they would affect photographs. Like many others, I do a lot of shooting indoors and there is not always ample sunlight. Longer exposures with a standard incandescent bulb often result in an orangish tint to pictures, even with auto-white balance. So I decided to do a test run and see if there was a difference with the Reveal bulb.

Test 1: Standard 60W Incandescent Lightbulb

Test 2: 15W Compact Fluorescent Lightbulb

Test 3: GE Reveal 60W Incandescent Lightbulb

I wish I would have had more light on the guitar to show the changes in the color, but you can see on at least the background that the GE bulb had truer light. Anyway, this was just a little experiment I did and I thought you guys might be interested.

 

[Hertz van Rental]

Auto white balance on digitals is quite often inaccurate as various elements in an image can affect it. You would be better off manually setting it to something like 4,200K as a starting point. You would then get a truer comparison.

 

[mysteryscribe]

or include a white card and just fix it post shooting. At least it works with film and a scanner. Usually all images taken at the same location with the same light just need the same setup. I would think that is true of everything. I think there is also a difference in the exposure with the two light sources. Minor but the last one might be putting out a little more light as well as a different color

Ps I love experiments

 

[PhotoPhoenix]

if your camera can be set to auto white balance i'm sure it could just as easily be set to tungsten..

 

[Raddy]

I've switched between auto and tungsten before while doing shots under incandescent lights and I couldn't see a discernible difference.

 

[PhotoPhoenix]

hmph, weird.. :scratch:

 

[jstuedle]

Best to set WB manually of a white target. This will assure proper white balance.

 

[Garbz]

It is a colour temperture issue. Why not adjust the white balance in software? The days of fixed colour temperture ended with film.

In lightroom I hit auto white balance and then just bumped it slightly back to the warmer side since I hate clinically white images.

The reality is it becomes easier to control the way you capture light than controlling the light itself. Anyone who has tried fill flashing against the sun and noted the vast colour difference will know what I mean.