flash setting

[newcannon]

I went to a dinner and I brought my cannon t1i, using the build it flash, for some reasons, that I really need help explaining, my picture turn out yellow!! I set the camera WB at "flash", shooting it with Aperture Priority, it came it out to be f2.8, and shutter speed 1/50. What is the right setting suppose to be so my picture doesnt come out yellow? and how do I fix it using canon digital photo professional. By the way it's in JPEG here's the picture itself.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tang_armor/5609310364/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tang_armor/5609310046/

 

[Big Mike]

Welcome to the forum.

Your issue certainly was the white balance....but you have a problem here that isn't easy to fix. You have at least two main sources of lights, the lights in the restaurant and your flash. The two are different type of lighting and their colors (white balance) are very different. So if you had set your white balance for the lights in the room, your flash would have caused a blue color cast. And by setting your WB to flash, the interior lights have caused a yellow color cast.

If you had set the WB to somewhere in between...you might have had something more normal...but you'd still have some areas that are too yellow and some that are too blue.
In other words, there is no 'right' WB setting for this situation.

To get around this problem, you could have turned off the flash and set your WB for the interior lighting. Or you could have used your flash and set your exposure so that the interior lights don't expose very much (but that would make it look like they were in a dark cave).
A more advanced technique would have been to use a color gel over your flash, so that it matches the interior lighting and thus, you could set a WB that would be accurate for both lights.

Either way, I'd suggest shooting in RAW (not JPEG) because RAW files give you the ability to change the WB on the computer. That won't solve this problem, but it does offer more flexibility.

 

[Robin Usagani]

Yup.. mike pretty much nailed it. Sometimes things like this happen and making the photo black and white is the most sense. But if you had a bigger flash you probably won't have as much problem especially if you set the flash power very low or very high.

 

[newcannon]

thank you big Mike for that info. So for future shoots in restaurants like that, there's no "right" setting on the camera itself for quick fixing the problem, except shooting in raw? so the only way to really fix this is to get a bigger flash? just like Schwettylens suggested ?

 

[Robin Usagani]

shooting in raw will still give you problems. Just think of the lights as different color. Tungsten lightbulb = yellow, flash = blue , if both are hitting the subject, the yellow hit mostly on the face, the blue hits the body, what do you see? You see 2 different colors. If you only have one color, you can just adjust the property of your WB so that yellow will be white on white surface (or blue on white surface).

 

[Robin Usagani]

I just checked out the photo, it looks like you just had the WB at the wrong setting. Either shoot with raw or set your WB temperature correctly using custom WB.

 

[kundalini]

A "window green" gel over your flash head will color balance with fluorescent lighting.

 

[Judobreaker]

Not sure if any other programs can do this but Photoshops Camera Raw can 'fix' your white balance in jpg photos.
It doesn't give you the standard dropdown options (like sunny, cloudy, etc.) but it does give you the slider with which you can edit it yourself and that works pretty good.