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Flash and real colours (1 Viewer)

tcollins

Well-known member
Colours of birds taken with a flash have a yellow tint. How do I fix it? I have a canon 30d which i use with a canon 100-400mm I recently bought a 580 ex II Flash. When I took it out in june to make images of a rainbow pitta I found them but the colours with the flash weren't true. They all came out with the greens of the bird being yellow. Have uploaded two images one with true colour wings(green) the other with yellow with the flash. The photos were taken firstly on P and again on tv with 125 speed set. The same result for both. Any ideas for how to over come this or explanations as to why it might happen. This is my first attempt to use a flash for birds.
Cheers
 

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Colours of birds taken with a flash have a yellow tint. How do I fix it? I have a canon 30d which i use with a canon 100-400mm I recently bought a 580 ex II Flash. When I took it out in june to make images of a rainbow pitta I found them but the colours with the flash weren't true. They all came out with the greens of the bird being yellow. Have uploaded two images one with true colour wings(green) the other with yellow with the flash. The photos were taken firstly on P and again on tv with 125 speed set. The same result for both. Any ideas for how to over come this or explanations as to why it might happen. This is my first attempt to use a flash for birds.
Cheers

You can change the white balance in camera (or during RAW processing) to flash - this should correct the colours. However anything lit by the sun in the image, not the flash, will have a colour cast. Alternatively, you can attach a colour correcting gel to your flash to balance the colour (just a colour filter for the flash) - for daylight you need a CTO (colour temperature orange) gel. Nice images BTW :t:
 
Thanks mark I did try to correct white balance without much success the image below gives as close as i can get to the real colour butway to much blue every where else
 

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I also use "hue/saturation in the software and click on yellow and back that down and that makes a big difference.
 
Yes, what everyone else has suggested. It would appear that the color balance setting on your camera could be adjusted to your advantage. But even if the initial images come out tinted, you should be able to adjust all colors to your liking in your post-processing. You have control over the levels of all individual colors in Photoshop.
 
Trying out the suggestion

Thanks everyone, in the end I used both white balance adjustment and exposure adjustment when changing from raw to jpg. then colour balance adjustment on a layer then erased all except the green wing. I used another layer to remove noise using neat image and again erased the bird I then used another layer to alter shadows and brightness on the black section of the bird and erased the rest. Flattened and thats the first image This is pretty close to true colours. I have included the resized first jpg image after raw conversion. A lot of pp here any other suggestions for camera settings which will give me truer colours?
 

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The problem with flash is not due to light balance the feathers are 'prismatic'. The angle of the light to the feathers changes the colour. There are many birds that 'change' colour when vied from different angles. Natural light is a combination of reflected and direct light. Flash replaces this with a 'point' source and the colour of the bird changes accordingly.
In the presentations I give to my wildlife art classes I point out the problems associated with the use of flash photographs for reference for paintings.
Point source highlights in eyes rather than reflections, multiple shadow direction, well lit creatures with dark backgrounds and well lit areas normally in shadow (Down the open throat of a big cat) The use of flash tends to introduce a sameness to photos. Flash is sometimes essential to get a shot but I prefer natural light when ever possible.
 
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