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Interested to know what WB settings others use, when shooting with flash indoors, sharing tungsten.

Scenario; Easter lunch with family, indoors, some window light, but mainly tungsten downlights, and an off camera flash.

The downlights provided nice "hair lights", and I used the flash for fill/main. I didnt get the gels out of the bag (of course that would be the more perfect solution, to match the flash to the tungsten). Set D200 to Auto WB. No grey card in use.

WB has set closer to tungsten, so the flash main light looks Blue on subjects face.

What you have done in this situation (limited to camera settings)? Would you have forced WB to flash, or tungsten? Something else?

I would set WB to flash but warm it a little. Not a huge issue if your "hairlights" are a bit warm.

But always use gels if you have the option!

Firstly, I never use Auto WB. It can and will change from shot to shot even under the same lighting condition. I prefer Sunny when using flash. In mixed lighting you can do a WB pre-test off a grey or white card and this is also usually fairly successful.

Take a shot of gray card (18% gray). Make sure the entire frame is filled with the gray colour. Then, use preset option in WB. That's the technique I use when there's a mixture of lights.

joey wrote:Take a shot of gray card (18% gray). Make sure the entire frame is filled with the gray colour. Then, use preset option in WB. That's the technique I use when there's a mixture of lights.

thanks, I've been learning to use my grey card, but on this occasion, I didnt have it with me, so was after any "non-greycard" tips.

Oz_Beachside wrote:

joey wrote:Take a shot of gray card (18% gray). Make sure the entire frame is filled with the gray colour. Then, use preset option in WB. That's the technique I use when there's a mixture of lights.

thanks, I've been learning to use my grey card, but on this occasion, I didnt have it with me, so was after any "non-greycard" tips.

Open the file in photoshop. Hit Ctrl-L, pick set white point in the right bottom corner. Find an object on the picture which is white colour and click on it.

If the room is filled with very warm tungsten light, and you want to balance it off with the flash, you can use your tungsten colour gel filter that came with the SB800.

Otherwise, set the camera WB to sunny or flash, and it should come out well. Or tweak your WB using Kelvins, starting with 5300 or 5000 and work your way to the correct exposure, should only take you a couple shot of experiment before getting it right, then all consistent WB results under same lights.

Oz_Beachside wrote: WB has set closer to tungsten, so the flash main light looks Blue on subjects face.

What you have done in this situation (limited to camera settings)? Would you have forced WB to flash, or tungsten? Something else?

If you shoot in RAW you can adjust the WB in PP. That's what I do.

As with Matt, I never user auto WB.

Mostly, I dial down my wb settings a notch or two, and set it to what the predominant light source will be.

And if I want to go preset - which is always a good option - I have a pringles cap in my bag.

Use gels on the flash to adjust flash output to ambient colour/temp, then use a preset in camera set (or dare I say a lens filter) for ambient conditions.

Other methods of simply trying to compensate with camera settings under mixed lighting are still going to see a warmer background and cooler subject which may be fine if that is what you are after...

Cheers

what matt K said...... but if it was me, I would make the flash the main light and set shutter exposure to pickup any other light source to give depth and atmosphere to the pixs.....

EDIT: I would use daylight white balance or flash white balance......

Agree with MattC.
Set your camera to tungsten and put the Rosco Cinegel CTO 3407 filter onto your flash. Then just balance the intensity of the flash with the ambient light.

And for fluorescent/flash light you need to set camera to fluorescent and put the Rosco Cinegel Green 3304 filter.

thanks for the options, and solid feedback, very useful, thanks again

For a mix of flash and tungsten lighting try using the FLUNGSTEN setting.