hospital lighting?

[ekc903]

Hi guys...I'm brand new to this forum and to my S2, so I have been enjoying your discussions for a few weeks.
My first question (of many):
Any suggestions on WB settings for shooting under hospital lighting? I am going to shoot some newborn pics tomorrow and the mother wants them shot in the hospital recovery room.
Any advice is greatly appreciated.
Thanks.

[sandman]

Take a piece of A4 paper in and do a custom white balance under hospital lighting , or use colour correction afterwards with an image editor, customs best.

Brian
if you're unsure how to do it, read the manual it's all in there.

[crabby]

The way I gray balance all my shots is just stick a gray card in one shot and que up that image first in EX Converter and just use the eye dropper to click on the gray card. (How's that for one big run on sentence.) Of course that's if you are shooting raw, if you're shooting jpgs then I'd do what the Sandman says.

[sandman]

Crabby
I use white card and get perfect results, but i've read a grey card is used instead.
I've used a grey card to get outdoor exposure on slide , but not for digital white balance, your views?

Brian

[ekc903]

Thanks for the replies...I am afraid I have no idea what A4 paper is. See what you're dealing with here? I will practice custom WB in different lighting tonight.

[sandman]

A4 size is about the size of a magazine page , just get a bit of plain white paper like you'd put in a typewriter. and use that.

[ekc903]

Regular paper? I can comprehend regular paper. I might need to relax about this digital thing...I am making everything a little complicated. Thanks again. More questions to come...

[apb]

Hi EKC - what you need is a Kodak Grey Card - one side is white and one is grey. You can set the S2 white balance from either side (white balance should really be titled something like color balance or neutral balance)

setting white balance is merely telling the camera that here is a true neutral subject to look at, and using that to analyze the light color temperature in the scene.

a piece of printer paper or foam core or bedsheet is not a true neutral - many papers for instance have bluing in them to make them appear more white. Without a consistent measured neutral card, you won't get consistent color. Printer paper on location 1 and foam core on location 2 will not give you the same neutral.

for some more info check out
http://www.warmcards.com/digital_camera2.html

As crabby says - you can shoot a grey card and clik balance it in Converter EX. You can also do a variation in this if you intend on shooting jpeg - shoot a grey card under each lighting condition you encounter. When you bring the images into photoshop just set your grey balance in a levels adj. layer, save the adjustment layer, and apply that adjustment to each image that was taken in that lighting situation.

cheers

andy batt

[sandman]

Good link Andy ,answered my question, i'll go into the page a bit more to see if they export to the U.K. some have no address link outside of the U.S., but those warmcards look really handy.

Cheers Brian

Sorry ekc for borrowing your reply.

[apb]

Hi Brian - you can also try Integrated Color Corp - they make a similar product that's a bit more expensive.

cheers
andy

http://www.integrated-color.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=GEL&Category_Code=CameraProfiling

[okidoki]

Awsome.
I have thought that there must be something out there to fool the white balance to "simulate filters"...

Now there is still one thing I haven't got yet...

It's the greycard and the EX...

Haven't shot too much RAW yet, JPEG has worked fine for me until this point.

Is there a tutorial / instruction somewhere???

Timo