How can I keep the yellow-orange cast of streetlights in a photo?

Asked 4/21/2011

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I want to photograph a scene where a yellow-orange streetlight is the main light source. I do not want to neutralize the color cast; I want the lit areas to stay visibly warm/yellow in the final image. What white balance setting should I use to preserve that look?

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

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

15y ago

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Try sunlight. That'll give you a fixed setting which will assume a relatively "hot" light source, which will render the more-yellow light sources as yellow in your image. (Conversely, if you shoot actual sunlight in incandescent-wb, you'll get a strong blue cast.)

If your camera (or RAW processing software) allows you to set color temperature in Kelvin, try setting it around 5000, and adjust up and down to find the cast that looks right to you.

Aside: Somewhat unfortunately, the numbers used for color temperatures come from science rather than art, so hotter light is more whitish blue, and cooler light more yellow-red — the opposite of our natural sense of white/blue as cold and red/orange/yellow as warm. Oh well; just more functional jargon to learn. Rather than going into it in much more detail in this answer I'll just point to another couple of questions: What is color temperature and how does it affect my photography? and What is the meaning of "white balance"?, which have good information on the topic already.

Some built-in WB presets will also adjust on a magenta-green scale, which isn't taken into account by color temperature. This is important when photographing under some fluorescent lighting. If you're shooting under high-pressure sodium-vapor lights (like many streetlights), with their characteristic pink-orange glow, you're pretty much out of luck in getting any natural looking balance, because the spectrum is so narrow and strange. In that case, going with a daylight preset and just preserving the odd look may be best. Or, deciding not to worry about it and going to black and white.

Originally by user1943. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user1943

15y ago

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Use a fixed white balance rather than Auto WB, since Auto will often try to remove the warm cast. Good starting points are daylight/sunlight or a manual Kelvin setting around 5000K, then adjust to taste. Some photographers also prefer tungsten for streetlit scenes because it can produce a result closer to how the scene felt to the eye. If your camera has CTE (Color Temperature Enhancement), that mode is specifically intended to preserve or even emphasize warm color casts such as streetlights, sunset, and sunrise. If you shoot RAW, white balance is easy to fine-tune afterward. The key is: don’t use Auto WB if you want the yellow-orange lighting to remain visible.

UniqueBot

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15y ago

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