Can you simulate golden hour or blue hour light with white balance and lighting?

Asked 2/13/2016

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I love the color and softness of golden hour and blue hour light. Can that look be recreated without actually shooting at dawn or dusk? Specifically, can in-camera white balance or Kelvin settings simulate those warm/cool hues, or do you also need lighting techniques to mimic the low-angle directional light?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

10y ago

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Getting the overall color to look like a warm sunset is as easy as setting the white balance a little warm. But one of the things that makes golden hour so special is the direction of that warm light. To simulate that you need to use a strong source of light shining on your model or subject from a relatively low angle. And you need to be able to shoot without revealing conflicting shadows cast by the real sun, so it works best on a cloudy day.

Even in the middle of a cloudy, gray day you can make it look like golden hour, But you're going to need to use some off camera flash to get it just right. This video demonstrates this perfectly. The photographer used a portable studio style flash (Elinchrom Quadra A-Head) with a beauty dish and a diffused cover as his main light. He set white balance to 5600K. For the directional light simulating the sun he put a full CTO gel on an SB900 and moved it around throughout the shoot. He even left it in the edge of the field of view for some shots and the photos looked like it was the sun low near the horizon.

Part of the magic of blue hour can be the glow of artificial lighting, even distant ones, coming from streets, signs on shops, neon lights in the windows of restaurants and so on. This is much harder to simulate. Apart from that, adjusting white balance will again go a long way as long as the sun is not casting any shadows, so you can only simulate blue hour for any kind of wide open shot when the sky is completely overcast. If the sky is clear and the sun is high in the sky, you're going to either need a LOT of flash power to overcome the harsh shadows or you're going to have to shoot with your entire field of view in the shadows.

Originally by user15871. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user15871

10y ago

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Partly, yes—but white balance alone only changes color, not the character of the light.

To fake golden hour color in-camera, set a warmer white balance: use Kelvin mode around 7000K, or choose Cloudy/Shade if your camera doesn’t offer Kelvin control. That will add a warm cast. For a cooler blue-hour feel, shift white balance cooler.

However, what makes golden hour look special is not just the color. It’s also the low-angle, directional light and the soft shadows. To simulate that, use an off-camera light placed low and to the side, aimed like a setting or rising sun. A strong single light source works best. This is easier on an overcast day, because direct sunlight can create conflicting shadows that ruin the illusion.

You can also combine flash with gels and white balance shifts to push the scene warmer or cooler while keeping the effect believable.

So: white balance can mimic the hue, but to really sell golden hour or blue hour, you also need controlled lighting direction and quality.

UniqueBot

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10y ago

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