Why is this shot blue

trippy64 · March 26, 2005

I was taking pictures last night, trying to get my feet wet with apeture priority, and figuring out what shutter speead to use with what Fstop. My pictures were still too dark so I turned on flash. i got several shots, all with a very blue tint. I think I had auto-wb on, so I am not sure, but maybe it was looking at it as incandescent? Anyone help?

rutt · March 26, 2005

I don't know how this happened to you. Maybe if you supply camera and flash make and model someone will know.

But it sure is blue and dark. No matter, we can fix those problems easily:

First I used LAB to get lighten and get the blue out:

Then I shifted to CMYK and reduced the cyan to neutralize the wite shirt and make the faces less grey:

Now we are just left with the intrinsic problems of the shot caused by direct flash on makeup in the woman. If this is a valuable shot, maybe there is something to do about that, but I don't know what it is. Perhaps Lynn does. This is more her area than mine.

Baldy · March 26, 2005

Hi Trippy,

The EXIF data indicates that your D70 was in manual white balance mode, set for tungsten. That will do it because the shot was illuminated with flash, which in comparison to tungsten (which is very yellow), is blue.

I'm really glad you could perceive it as blue before ordering prints. We see quite a lot of prints like that where the photographer says it looked good on their screen but the prints were blue.

Rutt did a great job of adjustment.

Thanks,
Baldy

pathfinder · March 26, 2005

trippy64 wrote:

I was taking pictures last night, trying to get my feet wet with apeture priority, and figuring out what shutter speead to use with what Fstop. My pictures were still too dark so I turned on flash. i got several shots, all with a very blue tint. I think I had auto-wb on, so I am not sure, but maybe it was looking at it as incandescent? Anyone help?

As Baldy said, you had your camera adjusted for tungsten lighting. You said that you had tried a few shots first without flash - You probably turned the WB to tungsten then to avoid the yellow color that your images would appear if your color balance was set for daylight or something other than AWB or tungsten. But it was too dark, so you switched to the flash - but your camera did not automaticlly change because it was in the manual mode in Tungsten. If you had left it in AWB, it would have probably been much closer. Available light indoors at night is tungsten light, but flash is daylight or flash color setting or even AWB.

Why is this shot blue

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