White balance questions


zacharyyong

New Member
May 3, 2009
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0
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Hi everyone,

Encountered an issue with white balance that I can't seem to understand/solve.

A basic gray top that I was supposed to shoot for a clothing catalog kept turning out purple.

When i color corrected it according to the gray card (which I used), everything else looked ok except for that top, which became obviously purple.

Yet when i color corrected the top by setting the neutral gray as the color of the top, the top turned out gray but everything else became too green/cyan.

The color of the top's supposed to be gray. In fact, I scrutinized it under the lights and it was definitely gray, a same shade of gray as the gray card that i used.

Here is a link to the picture: http://www.khainui.me/nui.jpg

In the attached picture, the left part of the image was color corrected for the image, which made the image fine except for the top.

The right part of the image was color corrected for the top, which made the top neutral gray but everything else became messed up.

Any ideas?
 

well with the info that you're providing i can see many variables that can contribute to the problem.

can you tell me what kind of lighting were you using for the shoot? from the looks of the picture, was it just general ceiling florescent light?
it'll help me narrow down the answer you need.
 

i'm using 2 500w monoblock strobe softboxes
 

also, are you shooting jpegs or raw?
 

shooting raw, and used capture one and a gray card to get the white balance (via the wb eyedropper)
 

i think the problem is due to a mix of:

1) metamerism of the cloth when interacting with your strobe light. (btw your model's skin looks overly red too)

2) inconsistent lighting of the subject and background.

to solve your problem, you have to:

1) adjust skin tone to your liking using masks

2) manually desaturate either the background or the clothing's color using masks, whichever way you prefer.
 

The part of the photo is definitively to much in mangenta, not only the top but also her skin. The right is too much into green. A good solution is somewhere in between. That neutral grey top may not be as neutral as you think. Often grey looks grey but when you illuminate it with coloured light it turns out not to be. Are your strobes neutral? Did you have ambient light as well? Is there a coloure surface in the studio?
 

What sort of camera?

This reminds me of the problem with the Leica M9 and especially M8 and IR (or is it UV?) light. As a new member I can't post links, but Google "Leica infrared fabric" and you should find a few links of grey synthetic fabrics going magenta. Wish I could say I experienced this problem firsthand with my Leica, but nope, just read about it. Some of the stories are pretty funny -- quickly detect knock-off silk!