( 
)
You can use fluorescent lighting to take beautiful product photos for your eBay auctions if...
you have a good camera with an excellent white balance function or specific programmed settings for balancing fluorescent lighting. Our eye adjusts the color of what it sees to match stored memories of what the color is "supposed" to be. That is the reason why our faces look perfectly fine to one another when viewed under office lighting. But take a picture of a person under fluorescent lights using color print film and no filters on the lens and see what you get ... a horrible putrid green cast to the skin. That's because even the "daylight" fluorescent tubes lack a sufficient amount of red in their spectrum. This tutorial will explain how to fix that problem and, in a second tutorial, I will show you a very inexpensive, but highly functional, lighting setup that you can make yourself: An inexpensive fluorescent lighting setup you can build.
Please spare two seconds to click the YES link at the end of this page
if you find this guide interesting, useful, or informative. It makes all my effort feel worthwhile. But, if you don't find this guide helpful please send me suggestions on
how to make it better that I will incorporate into revisions of this guide. Thank you.
Did you know that light actually has a temperature? All light has a color temperature measured in Kelvin degrees. Different light sources emit light at different temperatures; the higher the temperature the more blue the light is and the lower it is the more the light is shifted into red.
Just about everyone is familiar with the prism experiment and what it looks like when it happens naturally...
Each type of light also has a color spectrum that is different from the spectrum of white light separated with a prism into its rainbow of colors. This is why pictures taken under fluorescent lighting are tinted green and under incandescent light are tinted somewhere between orange and red.
You can test this for yourself by taking a perfectly white object into different lighting conditions and photographing it with color negative film or using your digital camera with no color correction set. Photograph it bathed in the light from your incandescent floor lamp (use different watt bulbs if you want to see a range of red-shifted colors -- 40, 60, 75, 100, 150, and 300 watt bulbs), one of the coiled fluorescent bulbs meant to replace regular light bulbs, fluorescent school or office lighting, lights in the mall, the bright yellow sodium vapor lights in parking lots, the purply-blue mercury vapor street lights, and even bathed in the light from your television, computer and a candle. To your untrained eye it will look pretty much the same under each type of lighting. I think you will be surprised by just how different your results will be. This is an excellent teaching tool to begin learning about color.
A white object photographed under the light from each of these bulbs will appear to be four different colors:
Now then, this is where the controls on a digital camera come beautifully into play. The white balance option will set your camera to change the way it "sees" the color of the light source much the same way our brains perceive something we "know" to be white as being white no matter what the actual color is of the viewing light. If we "tell" the camera which item in a scene is white the camera's processor will calculate the color temperature difference between the actual color of the white object and the correct color temperature of a white object. The camera then shifts all the colors in the scene by that difference.
Most advanced digital cameras provide a feature that allows you to manually set the white balance. Place a known white object in front of the lens and tilt it so that it is reflecting the light in the room (or from the studio lights). Fill the camera's screen with the object, press the white balance button and let the camera do the rest. My point-'n-shoot Nikon Coolpix P4 camera is programmed with a white balance function but it also has two different preset functions to balance the color of different fluorescent lights. While incandescent light is deficient in blue light in a virtual straight line (and easier to correct) fluorescent is not evenly lacking in red and contains a high level of green light. Having a camera that is preprogrammed to correct fluorescent is essential if you are striving for close-to-natural color in your photos.
Since fluorescent is so darn hard to work with why should anyone use it ... or even want to use it to light their pictures. In some cases we may not be able to control the light source (such as taking pictures on location). Actually fluorescent lights have some distinct advantages when adapted for a studio environment. Some of those advantages include:
Most advanced digital cameras provide a feature that allows you to manually set the white balance. Place a known white object in front of the lens and tilt it so that it is reflecting the light in the room (or from the studio lights). Fill the camera's screen with the object, press the white balance button and let the camera do the rest. My point-'n-shoot Nikon Coolpix P4 camera is programmed with a white balance function but it also has two different preset functions to balance the color of different fluorescent lights. While incandescent light is deficient in blue light in a virtual straight line (and easier to correct) fluorescent is not evenly lacking in red and contains a high level of green light. Having a camera that is preprogrammed to correct fluorescent is essential if you are striving for close-to-natural color in your photos.
Since fluorescent is so darn hard to work with why should anyone use it ... or even want to use it to light their pictures. In some cases we may not be able to control the light source (such as taking pictures on location). Actually fluorescent lights have some distinct advantages when adapted for a studio environment. Some of those advantages include:
- They are cool in actual temperature -- no roasting from photo flood lamps that are really heat lamps in disguise
- Much cheaper that photo floods to buy and use
- So much longer lasting than incandescents there is no rational comparison between them
- In general fluorescent is much brighter than incandescent
- Much more even lighting -- fewer hot spots
- Faster exposure times with increased brightness
- Evenness of illumination results in your photos having much more detail in the shadow areas
PS: Make sure that the camera's flash is turned off when using fluorescent lights. The electronic flash is very blue in color. That plus the shifted color in the fluorescent lighting will combine to make a photo with mixed light sources that simply cannot be fully color corrected.
Thanks for reading my guide on white balance and correcting the color in photos taken under florescent lights. Please spare a couple of seconds to click the YES link at the end of this page if you found this review interesting, useful, or informative. Your YES vote really does make me feel that all my effort is worthwhile in writing these guides.
Guide created: 11/25/07 (updated 08/24/08)
Thank you for voting. If your vote meets our 
