Shooting in a rented room with ceiling LED panels. I set a custom white balance off a grey card and the overall image is neutral, but skin still looks slightly green-yellow, and correcting the skin sends the walls magenta. Two different cameras do it. Is this a spectrum problem, and is there anything to do about it short of bringing my own lights?
The tell is exactly what you described: neutralising skin sends everything else magenta. That is a spectral mismatch, not a white balance error. Also check whether there are two different sources in the room — LED panels plus daylight through a window gives the same symptom and is much easier to fix by closing a blind.
Or turning the panels off entirely and shooting on the window. The best fix is usually removing a source rather than adding one.
If you have to shoot under them regularly, ask the venue for the CRI or TM-30 figures for the fixtures. Below about 90 CRI you will fight it every time, and knowing in advance means you can tell the client rather than discovering it in the edit.
Local corrections with a skin mask get you most of the way for one or two images. For fifty images it is not worth the time, build the profile.
@goldenhour_glen · 4w ago · 3 replies
It is a spectrum problem and white balance cannot fix it. Cheap LEDs have spiky, discontinuous output — a big blue peak and a broad phosphor hump with a hole where deep red should be. White balance applies one global shift, so you can neutralise the average and still have skin, which depends heavily on red reflectance, land in the wrong place. Options roughly in order of effectiveness: bring one good light and overpower the room, gel the panels with minus green if you can reach them, or shoot a colour checker in one frame and build a camera profile in your raw converter. That last one gets you surprisingly far and costs the price of a card.
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@whetstone_wes · 4w ago
The colour checker profile idea had not occurred to me. Does it need redoing for each room?
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@goldenhour_glen · 4w ago
Each lighting situation, yes. It is one frame at the start and then applies to the whole set, so once it is a habit it costs nothing.
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