Are there lamps / lightbulbs that emit ‘pure’ white light and where can I find those?
The reason I’m asking is that I’m a Lego builder and I frequently take pictures of my creations before breaking them down again. However, most of the time I’m doing that it’s pitch black outside (evening and all that) and I have to rely on electrical lighting. Now, I’ve found out that standard lightbulbs emit yellowish light, and I have to do a lot of correcting in Photoshop to get them to show up right. Even more so, colors like blue don’t really show up right. So I’m looking for lighting that’s more suited for standard (digital) photography. Any recommendations?
An electronic flash is going to be about as close to natural daylight as you’re likely to get outside of expensive high-wattage photo floods (and even those are still slightly more reddish than true daylight). I don’t use Photoshop, but doesn’t it have a color temperature correction like PaintShop Pro? Many digital cams also have built in color temp correction, as well. You might get acceptable results with a cool white fluorescent or CFL bulb; look for one with a color temp between about 4000 and 6000 K. IME, however, fluorescent lighting imparts an unnatural color cast to certain colors, which varies according to the specific mix of phosphors used. The main reason for this is that the spectrum of a fluoro bulb isn’t continuous like natural daylight, but is composed of discrete red, green and blue emission lines.
Some cameras have a ‘white balance’ feature that you may need to check, or they may let you select various lighting ‘modes’. (like tungsten or fluorescent)
There really isn’t “pure” white light, as white is comprised of the colors combined. There are, however, different color-temperature bulbs. You want something around 5000k.
The Ott-Light would be my suggestion for a good daylight-tone, or you could try using both incandescent and fluorescent together.
There are photo flood bulbs that might do what you want (here’s an example based on a quick google search). However, the quicker, cheaper way is to use the white balance feature on your digital camera to adjust for the color temperature of the light.
You can also include a color card in one of the first photos so that you can easily adjust to the correct color.
Zebra: I know of the ‘white balance’ feature, but more often than not it’s not really satisfactory. (probably to do with the cheap camera) When I look at the pictures in Photoshop, the blue colorchannel is usually lacking in detail, and generally has a lot of noise.
Garygnu/Q.E.D thanks for the recommendations, especially the bits about color temperature were useful. I think I’ll go shopping tomorrow
The camera performs reasonably well in sunlight, but as I said, the white balance is often off. Even at the correct settings, pictures sometimes end up too white or too red. Which is why I usually just don’t bother and do it myself in photoshop. And with indoor pictures it’s usually just the lack of blue in the lighting that f-s up the colors.
Here is a plugin for Photoshop for quickly doing color temperature correction. However, if the blue channel appears grainy and lacks detail, this probably won’t help. You can’t restore detail which isn’t there. I’d say it’s worth a try, but don’t expect miracles.
Isn’t this an artefact of JPEG compression? I seem to recall that JPEGs preserve less detail in the blue channel than in the red or green. If your camera has an non-lossy format option (typically TIFF), you might want to try that (though be warned that the file sizes will be a lot bigger).
>Isn’t this an artefact of JPEG compression? I seem to recall that JPEGs preserve less detail in the blue channel than in the red or green.
You don’t need much detail in blue. Your retinas first process details in red and green light and process finely-detailed colors as a red:green ratio. Then, a less finely resolved part of the retina also considers blue as the ratio blue:(red+green), usually called blue:yellow. Blue sensing got added to the visual system much, much later. This is why it is so hard to read yellow writing on a white background, or blue on a black background.
God dammit, what is with these silly little faces? The whole point of emoticons was how clever it was to make faces out of punctuation. Parsing parentheses into little glyphs ruins the goddam joke.
The kind of lights that I use for my dragon are a pretty good approximation of sunlight, and are readily available at any local pet store. On the other hand, I haven’t done much photography with them and they’re more expensive then the aforementioned photo lights.
GE “Reveal” light bulbs put out a very pleasing white light. According to their website, it’s due to “[t]he rare earth element neodymium that’s in the glass. (It’s what gives these bulbs their distinctive blue color when unlit.) When these bulbs are lit, the neodymium provides a pure, clean light by filtering out much of the dulling yellow cast common from ordinary light bulbs.”
They bulbs do look kinda funny when unlit; more than one person, upon seeing our ceiling fan, was baffled. “Blue light bulbs?” But the light they put out is much whiter than you get from a standard bulb.
I’ve been taking pictures of my scale models and my girlfriend’s dollhouse stuff using three 120W GE reveal floodlights in a home-made light tent.
The bulbs are a bit too blue for my taste, but my camera’s white balance can handle it. Then again, if your camera is really bad in the blue spectrum, too much blue might work for you. I usually get set up, shoot a couple pics of a white piece of museum board, and white balance it against that.
I tried for a while to use several different light sources (florescent & incandescent), but I found that to be very unsatisfactory - the combination of the florescent light flicker and the digital camera meant that no two pictures came out the same, even though the scene would look good to the eye. They became almost impossible to properly white balance, even if the pics were in the camera’s raw format.
I’ve found through trial and error that with digital, it’s better to use bulbs that are all the same type rather than different ones (i.e. don’t mix Reveal bulbs with soft white), so you don’t wind up with spots in the picture that have different color temperatures. It doesn’t so much matter what the bulbs are, as long as they’re all the same brand/type.
I really didn’t like the results I got when using the little halogen type lamps like in light tent link above - they were way too spotty and the color changes from the center of the spot to the outer edges. MR16s are even worse for this.
This was all learned through trial, error and reading stuff on the net, so I’m prepared to have someone with actual photography experience shoot me full of holes.
