speters Loc: Grangeville/Idaho

If in doubt, just use a custom setting!

11bravo

Guess I'm going to have to start carrying a small grey card for museums. Simple back when just about all displays lit by flouresent lights, just slipped a flouresent filter on my SLR. Now, variety of LED's, and if I can shoot RAW plus decently lower ISO, I do, to allow for PP corrections. But often will switch to handheld nightshot mode which sets its own white balance but does provide a sharper image but only JPEG.

bleirer

What is a fluorescent filter?

11bravo

Should have used the complete name: FLD filter.

"FLD is a filter for matching daylight film to fluorescent lighting (FL for Florescent Lighting, D for Daylight). On a film camera, you'd use it to correct for the different tone of light and give your shots a more natural looking colour."

Basically it eliminated the greenish cast if shooting flouresent lit objects with daylight film.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

I used a bagful of color correction filters back in my slide show production days. The FL-D was a generic conversion filter to convert Fluorescent lamps to Daylight film), while FL-B was a generic filter to convert Fluorescent lamps to 3200K (Type B) film. Neither were very reliably accurate. I had two different brands of each, and they yielded very different results with the same lights. And, of course, with five or six common classes of lamps, different brands of lamps, and different ages of lamps in fixtures, you never really knew what you were going to get from a new location.

What was reasonably accurate was a chart from the old Kodak Encyclopedia of Photography that listed Wratten CC gel filter combinations for every type of common fluorescent tube. I actually found it more reliable and likable than the color temperature meter I used briefly.

Today, THANK YOUR CAMERA MANUFACTURER for Custom or Preset or Manual white balance control!

And remember, NO filter need be used for raw capture, although it helps to pick a white balance and use it initially (from the metadata of the JPEG preview) to prime your conversion software.

But using an FL-D for sunset photos? Meh. I'll capture in raw and dial in the effect I want. No two sunsets are the same from minute to minute.

BTW, I use the iPhone app, Helios, to determine the sunset and golden hour times for each day of the year, at any location. It's very handy and very accurate.

bleirer

Ah, film. Those were the days.

jamesl Loc: Pennsylvania

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Put a grey card in a sbhot and check your white balance off of it.

11bravo

Always carried an FLD filter and a polarizer filter for 50mm and 70-210 zoom for my SLR. When traveling, shot a lot in museums as just about guaranteed illumination would be flouresent. These days, much more difficult to tell due to the wide variation in LED illumination.

anotherview Loc: California

The lighting products almost always (if not always) have a marking that states the Kelvin value. Daylight corresponds to a Kelvin of 5000 to 5200 (or even 5500). Tungsten corresponds to about 3000 Kelvin. Knowing these values, you can set the proper white balance in your camera.

For more and better information on white balance in respect to Kelvin, do a search on "Kelvin values."

This discussion may not appeal to novices and beginners, but using the white balance that matches the ambient lighting will improve the look of a photograph. So it is worthwhile to come to terms with white balance in time.

jwreed50 Loc: Manassas, VA

I almost always carry a gray card with me. Get a shot of the gray card in whatever the existing light conditions are and then use that to adjust the WB in your images in LR. Quick, easy and very effective.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

White balance is on two axes: blue to yellow (color temperature in K) and green to magenta (hue offset). So setting a Kelvin temperature is only part of the requirement. K works well for noon daylight and 3200K quartz halogen tungsten lights, but less well for lower CRI sources with big holes in their spectra (fluorescent and LED, sodium and mercury vapor, and HMI).