cony25

Ok, I have a canon 5d mark II,,,,it is supposed to be a good camera for low light...I used it without any flash whatsoever, inside a house and ALL pictures came out with a yellow tone...it had auto white balance,,,lightning was dark and the light was from those energy saver twirl light bulbs... why are the pictures yellow?

Pepper Loc: Planet Earth Country USA

Light bulbs even fluorescent have different color tones. Daylight will be a whiter light than would soft white. That can make a huge difference in your final image also the reflection coming from woodwork or cabinets. Try using a different WB setting on you camera.

Ched49 Loc: Pittsburgh, Pa.

Most times, auto white balance get's it right and sometimes it doesn't. Play with the different white balance settings in your 5D.

sueyeisert Loc: New Jersey

Try doing a custom white balance.

CatMarley Loc: North Carolina

Indoor lightbulbs can give colors from about 2000 herz to 5000 herz. The auto white balance of your camera's sensor may not be able to accurately read the color temperature and compensate for it. You should use your camera's custom whitebalance setting using a piece of white paper when you want correct color indoors.

marcomarks Loc: Ft. Myers, FL

Auto white balance has a limit as to what it can accomplish. I see this all the time when I'm shooting interiors for realtors. I do HDR with no flash and the whole house will have a yellowish tint because of incandescent bulbs. I can just adjust white balance in Photoshop and that solves it.

Even when people buy and use CFL bulbs they'll typically buy the ones that are simulating incandescent bulb yellowishness. Rarely do I find any homes where the owner has actually bought daylight CFL bulbs. I have them in my home and I think they're great but it takes a couple days to get accustomed to the very white light.

My camera goes crazy when the laundry room has florescents tube bulbs under the cabinetry and incandescent bulbs in the ceiling. And some florescents are greenish and some are yellowish. When I get all three in the same small room, my camera many times turns the walls into a kaleidoscope of colors when I'm shooting 7-shot bracketed sets for HDR for some reason. I'm thinking the white balance changes according to the exposure of each shot of the set and then the combination of the 7 white balances become a mess.

When you use flash, it blasts the room with hopefully "daylight" corrected light so that's why the yellowish problem is tamed down when using flash, although the last 3 external flashes I've had were a little warmer than "daylight."

KennyMac Loc: Lynchburg, VA

I shoot raw & never use AUTO WB. I use a Colorite brand expodisc (hung around my neck) to set custom WB one time for the time period I'm shooting outdoors. Also set it once for indoor no flash or indoor flash, or strobes. I sometimes have a problem with mixed light, but if you can't avoid it, there is no easy fix. I used to forget when I last set it, but now it's the 1st thing I think about when I shoot. If I need to tweak it, I just do it in LR after the fact, and sync it to all the rest in the shoot.
Ken

f8lee Loc: New Mexico

As has been hinted at so far but not stated explicitly, the photos take on a yellow (or "warm" ) hue due to the color of the ambient light.

While we cannot tell with our eyes, light indeed has color. Light color is measured in what is called color temperature, something stated in degrees Kelvin (not hertz, @Cat). The concept is used in physics - if you raise a "black box" to a given temperature it will glow; at 3400 degrees K it will be orange-yellow, at 5000 degrees K a more pure white.

Film balanced for outdoor use (back in the old days) was meant to be used in 5000 degree K light without a correction filter, while film meant for indoor use was balanced for 3400 degree K light, the latter because typical tungsten filament incandescent bulbs have a temperature in the 3200-3400 degree K range. Electronic flash tubes are made to put out 5000-5500 degreeK light, so are used with outdoor film (or the digital camera set to outdoor WB). Just like film, digital sensors have no brainpower processing the image and so to the sensor these differences are recorded.

Fluorescent tubes do come in a variety of colorations - if you ever see a bank of tubes turned on side-by-side (at a bulb store, perhaps) you can actually tell some are more purplish while others hew to the green tint. And nowadays CFL and LED indoor lights make for more of a mess when it comes to color temperature... some LED light "bulbs" are warm while others more daylight-balanced.

Meanwhile, the mercury vapor lights often used in gymnasiums (in case you're going to shoot a basketball game, say) are rather greenish, and no doubt you have seen sodium vapor lamps in outdoor light posts that are pretty obviously orange.

So to shoot indoors in available light nowadays you must comprehend this notion - "white light" ain't necessarily white, and indoors is rarely so (again, unless you use a flash). And with more varied possible light sources today - not just tungsten incandescent - that will remain true. The suggestion to shoot raw is a good one, in that this will allow you to make corrections in "post". Programs like Lightroom and Aperture enable you to mass-correct any number of images with a few clicks, so it needn't be overwhelming.

If you must shoot JPEG, then trying to get the WB setting right in the camera will be best - I am not familiar with your camera but will presume that it enables you to set a "custom white balance" by imaging a specific target and taking its own reading. Of the variety of tools out there to do this, among them the Passport Color Checker and the Expodisc already mentioned (as well as a slew of cheaper alternatives and the sometimes touted "use a sheet of white copy paper as the target" method) I have found the Expodisc to be the most compact and accurate.

Of course, you can correct light balance in JPEG images as well, but since the JPEG itself is the result of the in-camera computer throwing out a bunch of data to produce the image you just have less data with which to work.

I hope that answers your question.

amfoto1 Loc: San Jose, Calif. USA

Canon are notoriously "overly yellow" rendering tungsten and other "warm white" lights in the 2800-3400K range. Not just in the Auto WB setting, either. Even in the "tungsten" WB setting it's common for images to come out too yellow.

Learn to set a Custom White Balance with your camera. Your images will be much, much better.

This is easy and fully described in the manual. You can get WB "targets" (such as Lastolite EZ Bal)... or just use a standard gray card or even a plain white napkin or piece of paper. There also "Warm Cards" that give a very slight bias toward the warm or cooler spectrum.

Another easy "trick" is to shoot an extra image of a target of known color (such as the Lastolite or standard gray card), best to shoot RAW, then color correct in post-processing software. This can be as simple as a quick sampling with an eye-dropper tool, then apply that setting to all the related images.

Any sort of CFL (compact fluorescent light) bulb is especially tricky to get right. The typical household type cycle on an off at a high rate (120x per second in the U.S.), which we typically don't see with our eyes, but a camera can capture. This can lead to both poor exposure and to color shifts. Sodium vapor and mercury vapor lamps do something similar, too (though the tints they produce are skewed in different direction than fluorescent).

There are "stabilized" fluorescent lamps, especially for photography... but they're rather expensive.

CatMarley Loc: North Carolina

These answers are getting overly complicated. It is really simple.
1. Read your camera manual on how to set WB manually.
2. Get a piece of white paper in the same light you expect to shoot the picture.
3. Set the WB manually with the white paper.
There you're good to go!