[Leica] 1Ds Mk II at ISO 3200 & 20D SURPRISE SURPRISE! ;-)

[henningw at archiphoto.com (Henning Wulff)]

At 11:38 PM -0800 2/7/05, Feli wrote:
>Glad to be of assistance, sir. ;-)
>
>Yep, for some reason tungsten lighting is the achilles heal of 
>digital Canon cameras.
>
>Daylight, no problem. Mixed light, no problem. Even florescent seem ok.
>But tungsten is out, and the lower the wattage (i.e. the lower the 
>color temperature (5000k and below))
>the worse it gets.
>
>I'm not sure how to color balance a 20D. I'm going to take a wild 
>guess and say it involves balancing the camera off of a large 18% 
>gray card held under the lights you will be shooting under. At least 
>that's how it used to work back in the dark ages of video cameras... 
>Somehow you have to lock that reading into the camera, but I am not 
>sure how to do this, since I don't have a 20D at hand! 8-)


The whole thing is very simple. If you shoot RAW, you set your colour 
temperature and green/magenta balance when you import your shot into 
Photoshop. RAW files contain the same info whether you set your 
camera on AWB, daylight or tungsten or whatever. The latter settings 
only tag the RAW file for initial viewing in the Camera RAW window, 
but don't change the file data. So shoot RAW, and use the little 
sliders in PS Camera RAW to adjust your colour balance (and 
expoosure, if necessary) as you bring it into the main editing window 
of Photoshop.

You only need to set the colour balance accurately if you shoot jpeg. 
There, if the picture has been shot with incorrect colour balance 
set, you _lose_ information when you try to correct it, and it is a 
lot harder to correct, with cross-over becoming a possibility under 
some circumstances. So if you are taking a lot of shots under a 
certain type of lighting in jpeg, you take a frame-filling picture of 
a neutral (white, 18% grey, black, whatever) surface and tell the 
camera to use that as a reference. It takes a couple of button 
pushes, but once you've done it, it takes about 15 seconds.

But mainly, shoot RAW!



>Here's another angle. In Photoshop look under:
>
>Image -> Adjustments -> Photo Filter
>
>This will pop up a dialog box, which emulates a bunch of filters you 
>are probably familiar with from shooting color film:
>
>Warming Filter 85
>Warming Filter 81
>Cooling Filter 80
>Cooling Filter 82
>
>etc.
>
>To be honest this is a band-aid, but in a pinch it may help. 
>Obviously the ideal solution is to balance the camera properly.
>
>The reason why your monitor and printer don't look alike has to do 
>with the whole color pipeline, that is your
>workflow.
>
>Camera -> Photoshop and monitor -> printer
>
>Now, so that the red flower you shot with the 20D comes out on the 
>printer looking correct, each component has
>to have a profile of the proceeding stage, so that when Photoshop 
>tells the printer to draw something light red, the
>printer knows WHICH shade of light red to draw, so it matches what 
>you saw on your monitor.
>
>How to fix it? Frankly I'm still figuring all of this out myself. At 
>work we have a color guy, who does all
>the math and makes sure red is red. Unfortunately I am 80% artist, 
>so it takes me a while figure these
>things out. ;-) This is the part of working with digital that can be 
>infuriating, but once you got everything setup,
>it's pretty amazing.
>
>There probably is someone on the list who can explain this a lot 
>better than me.
>
>
>Good luck!
>
>Feli
>
>
>
>On Feb 7, 2005, at 10:35 PM, Ted Grant wrote:
>
>>Feli offered:
>>Subject: Re: [Leica] 1Ds Mk II at ISO 3200 & 20D
>>
>>>That said, Ted be aware that if you are shooting under warm 
>>>tungsten lights, the Canon will balance the
>>>scene very warm, to the point that it may look like someone stuck 
>>>a CTO gel on your front element.<,,
>>
>>Hi Feli,
>>I took your words of wisdom to heart and gave it a try! Shot some 
>>frames in our family room, all tungsten bulbs in various lamps. And 
>>guess what? ;-) You are right! :-)
>>
>>I had shot in there before, but never printed one to see how it 
>>would actually look as a colour print. It's not bad because the 
>>room is a Tudor style with half wooden walls and beams, with the 
>>upper half of the walls and ceiling white. So on the camera screen 
>>they looked OK.  But to print, it's quite different! :-)  Slightly 
>>warmer than I expected.
>>
>>However, now I have to figure out how to use white balance if 
>>sometime I need a better colour balanced look. Although I imagine I 
>>could also correct it using PhotoShop?
>>
>>In the high school gymnasiums the auto-white balance seems to keep 
>>the colours much closer to normal looking. But in these locations 
>>it's a mixture of lights and not all tungsten so I'm sure that 
>>makes a major difference for colour balancing.
>>
>>And with these when you click "auto colour" in PS everything cleans 
>>right out to white backgrounds as it should look with excellent 
>>skin tones. So obviously under tungsten light it definitely stays 
>>on the warm side. Thanks for pointing this out. :-)
>>
>>See what I mean about this good ol' LUG? Man you always learn 
>>something every day! :-)
>>
>>ted

-- 
    *            Henning J. Wulff
   /|\      Wulff Photography & Design
  /###\   mailto:henningw@archiphoto.com
  |[ ]|     http://www.archiphoto.com