Context: I took some photos with friends. It was evening and we were inside, only one weak light on. Possibly incandescent bulb but I didn’t check. Going by memory it was quite dark (I went up to 6400 ISO…) and the light was very warm.

Now here’s my problem. The camera had set the color temperature at around 2900/3000 K. The photos were IMO too reddish.

So I tried adjusting it with Lightroom’s “eye dropper”, selecting a wall as reference for “white” (Not my house, but I think it was white). Temperature went to about 2400K, but they were now too cold and the photos’ joyous atmosphere vaporized. We were celebrating and having a poker with alcohol, yet they now looked like photos taken in a morgue…

I don’t think there was something objectively wrong, but the feeling is not the one I had while shooting them. Nor the one I wanted people to have while looking at them.

I manually changed the photos to about 2650K (didn’t touch “tint”, only “temperature”). They didn’t look too orange, but at the same time they didn’t feel depressing. I think it was the best compromise I could get.

How do you guys do it? I’m no professional so I went by feeling. What would you have done in this case? Should I have left Lightroom’s auto choice, despite the “morgue effect”?

P.S. Shooting RAW with a Nikon D3500, in case it matters.

  • ido-scharf@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I mostly shoot landscapes, and basically never shoot indoors or with other artificial light, so my experience is probably not relevant to your specific question. But it might help in a broader sense.

    As someone here pointed out, the “correct” white balance might be defined as one that makes a white object appear white. Suppose we all agree that snow is white… But what colour should it appear in a photo taken before sunrise? And how should it look right after sunrise, when it’s directly lit by a very low sun? To me, that’s some shade of blue/cyan and red/orange, respectively.

    I also record and process raw files. The white balance setting on my camera is pretty much always on Daylight; that’s the best starting point for me (again, in natural light outdoors). Any white-balance adjustment I make from there is usually subtle.