I had a church gig Saturday night. The Easter Vigil service starts outside with a fire (for ecclesiastical reasons I won't bother to explain) and then moves inside the building. Because I only shoot this once a year I never remember what I did before and have to reinvent the processing routine. I decided to use a 50mm f/1.8 prime lens in shutter priority and shoot RAW with Auto white balance and ISO set at 800.
I was surprised at how well "auto WB" handled things...
If I had thought properly ahead I would have jumped way past my first dozen or so images and processed one of the shots with people in "white vestments". The eyedropper would have made getting proper white balance pretty easy. Then I could have simply used "previous conversion" for all the rest of the images. Of course I didn't think of that so I stumbled along and finally got it right.
The fire puts out a very warm, orange light and, surprise, surprise, the tungsten setting seemed to be exactly what I needed. By the time I got to the first image containing "white vestments" the eyedropper confirmed that I had "doing it right" all along using "tungsten".
It's interesting to me that the change from "as shot auto" to "WB adjusted in ACR" was very, very subtle ... not much of a change at all. Now, when we moved inside the church and all the tungsten lights were turned on, Auto WB did not handle it well at all. All of those shots were pretty crappy before I applied the tungsten setting in ACR.
Here is what a few of my outside, firelight shots looked like after ACR and PSE processing.
Of course, I could have used a speedlight but that isn't any fun. I was after the mood of the event.
One word of advice if you ever try this: watch out for people very close to the fire. The firelight produces blown highlights on the faces just as bad as what you get from an on-camera flash.
Rusty
I was surprised at how well "auto WB" handled things...
If I had thought properly ahead I would have jumped way past my first dozen or so images and processed one of the shots with people in "white vestments". The eyedropper would have made getting proper white balance pretty easy. Then I could have simply used "previous conversion" for all the rest of the images. Of course I didn't think of that so I stumbled along and finally got it right.
The fire puts out a very warm, orange light and, surprise, surprise, the tungsten setting seemed to be exactly what I needed. By the time I got to the first image containing "white vestments" the eyedropper confirmed that I had "doing it right" all along using "tungsten".
It's interesting to me that the change from "as shot auto" to "WB adjusted in ACR" was very, very subtle ... not much of a change at all. Now, when we moved inside the church and all the tungsten lights were turned on, Auto WB did not handle it well at all. All of those shots were pretty crappy before I applied the tungsten setting in ACR.
Here is what a few of my outside, firelight shots looked like after ACR and PSE processing.
Of course, I could have used a speedlight but that isn't any fun. I was after the mood of the event.
One word of advice if you ever try this: watch out for people very close to the fire. The firelight produces blown highlights on the faces just as bad as what you get from an on-camera flash.
Rusty