Redish/Yellowish tin - low light issue

Bokeh · Nov 21, 2004

I recently bought the 50mm 1.4 for taking boxing matches in low light. I covered my frist event tonight, and the pics aren't really dark which is good, but they have a redish/yellowish tint to thm that makes them look kind of yucky. Flash wasn't allowed. I captured at 320 f/1.4 for all of them. Any ideas? 320 isn't that fast of a shutter speed. Fortunately none of them were blurry. Thanks

Alison · Nov 21, 2004

I'm taking a guess here, but it could be the lighting that is giving of that color, i.e like you get with tungsten lighting. You might try a filter and see if that helps. So if you're getting red, try a red filter etc and see if that improves the light cast.

Hertz van Rental · Nov 21, 2004

Are you shooting on digital or film?
If on film then it sounds like you are using daylight colour film under tungsten light. You can get neg and tranny film specifically for tungsten (better than using a filter).
If you are using digital then it sounds like you need to check the white balance.
Mind you, you are at a boxing match so it could be a mixture of tobacco smoke and blood hanging in the air ;-)

j_mcquillen · Nov 21, 2004

If you're shooting on normal daylight film, under Tungsten lighting, then you need to use a blue filter to balance the colour cast, rather than a red...

mavrik · Nov 21, 2004

What camera? Can you set a custom white balance? That would solve the issue pretty quickly. If not, try color balance and/or hue/saturation in Photoshop and select just yellows, add about +30 to yellow 'lightness' - that will turn the yellows back to white and remove some of the tint.

M

John Orrell · Nov 21, 2004

Using a filter will effectively negate any advantage you gained by buying a fast lens!

If you're shooting with digital you can set a custom white-balance, otherwise you're left with:

(a) using faster film with a filter
(b) using tungsetn-balanced film
(c) scanning it and changing the colours on your computer

Bokeh · Nov 21, 2004

It was a 300d. I suspect maybe a white balance problem also. I'll check the camera setting and post a pic today, thanks.

mavrik · Nov 21, 2004

If you wanna post a pic, I'll do my best at a quick PS fix for you.

M

Bokeh · Nov 21, 2004

Hi guys,

Here are a couple of photos. This was on a 300d at 1/320 shutter. I thougth of turning down the shutter but was afraid I'd start getting blur and figured it was better to have no blurr than a brighter image.

The white balance was set to "auto" ISO 800. Please let me know why they look like this, and anything I might do in photoshop to correct it. I've played around with brightness and contrast to no avail.

Thanks again

P.S. I actually did lighten the second one a bit trying to get it to look right.

And on a side note, the 50mm was an awesome lens for this type of venue - no blurr on a single pic, and I even got a shot of a guy jumping in the air about 4 feet with zero blurr.