Can I fix white balance after the fact if I know the scene was lit by sodium vapor lamps?
Asked 12/8/2016
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2 answers
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I shot a night scene and didn’t set white balance correctly. The image looks more orange than the scene appeared to my eyes. I’m no longer on location, so I can’t photograph a gray card there now. Since I know the lighting was from sodium vapor street lamps, can I use that information in Lightroom to correct the white balance? Is there a way to make the scene look more like it did visually, or to set the lamps to their “correct” color?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
9y ago
2 Answers
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The color of the sodium lights as they looked to you at the time is a subjective perceptual phenomenon. Using a gray card in the lights wouldn't really help, because you're not interested in balancing away the color of the sodium vapor lights (which doesn't really work very well anyway).
If you were physically located within the illumination from another substantial source of light, you could take a gray card reading of that, which might be a useful starting point for what your senses were using as a reference. Most likely, though, if you were looking at a large enough area lit by the sodium, your visual system was doing at least some degree of adaptive compensation, attempting to make the colors of objects look more "normal" to your brain than they do to a camera.
Given all of that, your best bet might be to start with a white balance setting in the 5000-5500K range, which will show the lighting as it is relative to daylight, and adjust the temperature downward from there to approximate what you were seeing. You may also need to slightly adjust the green balance ("tint", or whatever Lighroom calls it) to your liking.
Originally by user37649. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user37649
9y ago
0
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Only partly. Sodium vapor lamps are already very orange/yellow, so making the lamps look “correct” is not the same as doing a normal white balance. White balance assumes a neutral reference under broad-spectrum light; sodium lighting is difficult because it has a very limited spectrum, and our eyes/brain adapt to it better than a camera does.
So there isn’t a precise Lightroom setting you can enter just from “sodium vapor.” In practice, you have a few options:
- Adjust WB by eye to match your memory of the scene.
- Use a known neutral or white object in the image as a reference, if one exists.
- If you can shoot another scene under the same type of lights with a gray card, create a preset/profile and apply it as a starting point.
A gray card under the sodium lamps wouldn’t necessarily make the scene look the way you remember, because your visual system was adapting to the lighting.
Bottom line: knowing the lamps were sodium vapor helps explain the color cast, but it does not give you an exact correction. The best result will usually come from a manual adjustment or a reference shot made under similar lighting.
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