Why are all my night shots "yellow"¿

wheresdavid

It seems that all my night shots are "yellowish". here are two photos of old adobe buildings that are really "white" but when i took photos of them at night they are "yellowish". I took shots at each of the white balance settings that i had but wasnt able to get one where the building was white (or close to white). Any ideas?:dunno






the building in the above photo is white and i believe the door should be blue.

digismile

Couldn't see any EXIF info to see your Camera settings. It's not uncommon to have a shift under various artificial lighting. I'm just surprised that there is virtually no blue at all (the blue channel on the first photo is virtually black). I'm even more surprised that not one of the White Balance settings came up with something better than this.

I've taken lots of night photos and don't recall ever having this extreme a color shift. What was the primary light source? What was the length of the exposure? And what mode was your camera set to?

Are your daytime photos looking OK?

LiquidAir

I opened the second shot in Photoshop. The blue channel is quite dark and the red channel is severely blown out. Only the green channel looks about right.

Some simple curves in Photoshop gave me this which is probably closer to the original color:

145590795-S-Edit.jpg

Possibly it is the auto white balance gone extremely haywire. You might try using one of the other white balance modes. Other than that, I have no idea what would cause this.

Edit: Just saw that you already have tried white balance.

pyroPrints.com

You may have inadvertantly changed some settings. Look where that may have been, and as a last result try doing a settings reset.

wheresdavid

the camera was set to AV

exposure was about 10 seconds

light source was some type of "street light".

my daytime fotos look ok.

question, May i add the EXIF info and if yes, how do you do that? i thought it was automatically included. maybe i have EXIF confused with camera information.

digismile wrote:

Couldn't see any EXIF info to see your Camera settings. It's not uncommon to have a shift under various artificial lighting. I'm just surprised that there is virtually no blue at all (the blue channel on the first photo is virtually black). I'm even more surprised that not one of the White Balance settings came up with something better than this.

I've taken lots of night photos and don't recall ever having this extreme a color shift. What was the primary light source? What was the length of the exposure? And what mode was your camera set to?

Are your daytime photos looking OK?

Tanuki

wheresdavid wrote:

exposure was about 10 seconds

light source was some type of "street light".

quote]

As already mentioned, it might be that your camera's auto WB made a bad choice and you can solve by manually setting your camera WB to a warmer setting (e.g., tungsten) next time.

Another possibility is that your lighting source was mixed, but primarily from sodium vapor lamp or other monochromatic light source. If this is the case, you will need to add more light from the other sources (i.e., other than sodium vapor lamps) or bring your own light source.

If the light source is the problem and you can't add other light sources and you already have your camera WB set on it's warmest setting, you could try using a blue lens filter to bring the WB of the scene into a range that your camera can handle. You will have to take a longer exposure, and you might have to play around with manual WB to get it right, but you should get better results.

Regards,
Mike

LiquidAir

Tanuki wrote:

Another possibility is that your lighting source was mixed, but primarily from sodium vapor lamp or other monochromatic light source. If this is the case, you will need to add more light from the other sources (i.e., other than sodium vapor lamps) or bring your own light source.

Sodium Vapor is what it looks like. They can have so little blue in them that the white balance cannot compensate. If you want to make shots it that light work at all, you will need to underexpose by a stop or maybe more to keep the red channel from blowing out. Then you can manually white balance the shots in Photoshop some time later. Shoot RAW and at ISO 100 to get the best signal you can in the blue channel because you are going to have to severely underexpose it and boost it later which will amplify the noise considerably.

wxwax

Sodium lights.

wheresdavid

Thanks , i´ll give this a try next time.

LiquidAir wrote:

Sodium Vapor is what it looks like. They can have so little blue in them that the white balance cannot compensate. If you want to make shots it that light work at all, you will need to underexpose by a stop or maybe more to keep the red channel from blowing out. Then you can manually white balance the shots in Photoshop some time later. Shoot RAW and at ISO 100 to get the best signal you can in the blue channel because you are going to have to severely underexpose it and boost it later which will amplify the noise considerably.