Last week I had the pleasure of touring the beautiful city of Rome, Italy & marvelling at the beauty inside of all the cathedrals. Just getting the W1, I had to experiment with the different setting on the camera to get a decent picture - Without going into the MANUAL mode, I selected Candlelight mode., but yet they turned out to have a yellowish to orange tone in them. Not satisfying. can anyone help me with this so I can get more natural colors under these conditions??? Thanks Bill
Bill, I don't have a W1 and I've never heard of a Candlelight preset but it sounds rather gimmicky and highly arbitrary -- you're at the mercy of the designers' whim here. They could intend a white balance which deems a typical candle flame to be "white", or they could have set out deliberately to provide a WB that evokes a warm and cozy mood even with flash. Who knows... If the cathedral is lit mainly by daylight coming in the windows, then you may want to record things much as you see them, in which case a Daylight WB setting would be preferable. If it's artificially lit then Incandescent may be as close as you'll get, though it will depend on the actual lighting in use. If it's discharge type lighting -- a mercury variant or high pressure sodium, then anything can happen. If the camera has it, Manual (custom) WB will always be the most accurate in odd lighting situations. That doesn't help with what you already have on file, but any reasonably comprehensive image editing software will allow you to shift the overall hue of what you've recorded. The best way to start is to reference the image's grey (midpoint) setting to some neutral object in the shot, and the stonework in a church should give you plenty of targets to try (you usually have to poke around a bit till it looks right. The general technique is described at the following link for Photoshop (I suggest you use the Levels dialog), while PS Elements has its own dedicated WB tool which is a bit easier to use.
Posted on Sep 15, 2005
34 views
Usually answered in minutes!
×