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Photographers working on location may not be able to care-
fully control the color temperature of the light. The existing
light in the scene often does not match any standardized
photographic color balance. It may be impossible to get rid of
the existing light. Even in an indoor location in which the
existing light can be turned off, it may be essential to leave it on
for enough light to illuminate a large area. This nonstandard
color has unpredictable consequences if photographers do not
anticipate problems and take steps to deal with them.
Why Is the Color of the Light Important?
Shooting a color image with light sources of different colors can
be a serious problem. When we look at a scene, our brains
compensate for some fairly extreme differences in the color of
light to interpret most scenes as lit by “white” light. There are
exceptions to this: if you are traveling at dusk, with your vision
10.8
Holding the flash high
enough causes many
distracting shadows to
disappear.
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adjusted for dim daylight, you can see the lights of a distant
house to be the orange color that they really are. If you stop at
that house, however, and go in, your brain will immediately
compensate again and you will see the light as white. To see
why, let’s look at the two standard light colors, tungsten and

daylight.
Tungsten. This applies to a scene illuminated by tungsten
bulbs. These tend to be relatively orange. Set for tungsten,
the camera white balance compensates for the orange. Used
with tungsten lights, it produces picture colors that are close
to natural.
If, however, we were to use a tungsten white balance to
shoot a picture illuminated by daylight, the resulting color
would be nonstandard. Instead of looking “normal,” the
entire scene would appear very blue.
To be accurate, we have to point out that household
tungsten bulbs almost never produce light that is the color
of photographic-standard tungsten. They are more orange
when they are new and get still more orange with age.
Quartz-halogen lights, used by photographers and theater
producers, do have accurate tungsten color and keep that
accurate color through the duration of the life of the lamp.
Daylight. Daylight white balance produces standard color in a
scene that is illuminated by the sun. Obviously, sunlight is
different colors at different times of day and in different
weather conditions. Originally “standard daylight” was sun-
light, at a specific time of day, at a specific time of year, at a
specific location, and on a cloudless day, in Britain.
Such light is rich in blue, and that is why the sky on a
clear day is blue. A daylight color balance compensates for
this and gives the most accurate color reproduction used
with either mid-day sunlight daylight or strobe. If this bal-
ance is used with tungsten light, the pictures look orange.
Nonstandard Light Sources
Photographers consider daylight and two slightly different

colors of tungsten light to be “standard.” All of the others are
nonstandard to us. Unfortunately, “nonstandard” does not
mean “unusual” or “rare.” Other lights are quite common. We
will use a few of them as examples. This does not approach a
complete list of nonstandard sources, but they show the
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dangers well enough to keep you alert to the potential problem
in any location assignment.
The frequent mix of lighting, especially in many modern
offices, is the root of the problem. The digital camera can com-
pensate for the color of almost any nonstandard light.
Furthermore, it can compensate for almost any even mix of
light colors. The difficulty comes from an uneven mix: part of
the scene is lit by one light, and other areas are lit by lights of
other colors. It’s expecting too much to want the camera to fix
such problems, and we have to think better than the camera
does to fix them ourselves. Following are some common non-
standard light sources.
Fluorescent tubes are the nonstandard light source photog-
raphers encounter most frequently. The light produced by flu-
orescent tubes presents photographers with a special problem.
In addition to being nonstandard, it comes in many different
colors. Age changes the color of fluorescent tubes slightly.
Furthermore, people replace burned-out tubes with new ones
of another type. After a few years, a single large room may have
several different types of tubes. A white balance that is good for
any particular type of tube may be bad for the rest.

As a rule, the light from these tubes tends to have a strong
green cast. This can produce some particularly unpleasant non-
standard colors when either tungsten or daylight film is used.
People, in particular, tend to look awful when they are pho-
tographed under uncompensated fluorescent lighting.
Nonstandard tungsten light is more common than either of
the photographic standard tungsten color temperatures.
Ordinary tungsten bulbs are significantly more orange than
photographic bulbs, and they get more so as they age. The dif-
ference is enough to matter whenever color balance is critical.
Nonstandard daylight does not surprise most people. We all
know that sunlight is much redder at dawn and dusk. What
surprises most of us more is learning that daylight can be very
nonstandard, even in the middle of a bright day.
Figure 10.9 illustrates two different kinds of daylight. The
house on the left has direct sun coming through a window onto
the subject. Such direct light from the sun will be slightly
warm. It will have a slightly red to yellow color bias. On the
right, we see a different “daylight” situation. This time the sub-
ject is being lit by light that comes from the blue sky rather than
the sun’s direct rays. This light is decidedly cool. It has a good
deal of blue in it.
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Both of these subjects are illuminated by daylight. The only
problem is that the “daylight” is very different in each of them.
Each produces a picture with a different color balance. The
cause of the problem is that each subject lacks part of what we

accept as standard daylight.
When photographers use the term daylight we mean light
that is made up of a combination of rays that come directly
from the sun and those that come to us from the sky around it.
In the preceding example, each subject was lit by only one of
the two parts of that combination.
Another common cause of nonstandard daylight is foliage.
Subjects shaded from the direct sunlight may still be illumi-
nated by the open sky. This causes the same blue shift we saw
in the subject on the right in the preceding example. This prob-
lem is compounded by green leaves filtering and reflecting
whatever sunlight does reach the subject. In extreme cases, the
result looks more like fluorescent light than daylight.
Once again, the color error may not be significant in many
cases, but we have to think about the importance of accurate
color in each scene and decide whether the problem needs a
remedy.
Sun
Open Sky
10.9
The direct sun striking
the house on the left is warm
colored, noticeably biased
toward yellow. Light reaching
the house on the right comes
from the blue sky, and it will
have a much cooler, blue-biased
color.
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Do the Colors Mix?
There are two basic situations that we encounter when working
with different colored light sources. The first of these happens
when we use what we will call unmixed color; the second occurs
with mixed color. As you will see shortly, unmixed and mixed
color present different challenges, and they are handled in dif-
ferent ways.
Mixed color lighting is just what the name implies. It occurs
when the rays of light with different color balances mix or blend
together to produce a color balance different from that of any
single light source.
Figure 10.10 shows how light sources can mix together in
this way. Fluorescent tubes provide the ambient illumination. A
strobe is bounced from the ceiling.
The bounced strobe illuminates the scene much as the
fluorescent tubes do. The light rays from the flash tube mix
with those produced by the fluorescent tube. The result is a
fairly even illumination throughout the scene by light of a dif-
ferent color balance from either the flash or the fluorescent
tubes alone. Figure 10.11 is shot with evenly mixed light
sources. Every light was “wrong” for photography, but the mix
was easy to correct.
10.10
Mixed strobe and
fluorescent illumination produces
evenly colored light.
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Unmixed color is diagrammed in Figure 10.12. The scene is
the same, but the strobe is now directed at the subject, not the
ceiling. This is a common example of a scene that is illuminated
differently by each of the two light sources.
Fluorescent Lighting
10.11
Mixed color is easy to
correct, if everything is lit
roughly equally by all sources.
10.12
Using the flash as
shown here will produce a
picture in which different parts
of the scene are illuminated by
very differently colored light.
This can cause serious
problems in color photography.
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Notice in the diagram that the bulk of the scene is lit by
overhead, fluorescent bulbs. However, the foreground subject
and his immediate surroundings are lit by the flash.
The result is two very differently colored areas in the pic-
ture. The foreground subject and his immediate surround-
ings will be illuminated by the relatively blue “daylight” from
the electronic flash. The rest of the scene will, however,

receive the green light from the overhead fluorescents. The
problem is that the camera can be balanced for only one light
source.
Sometimes unmixed lighting can occur when we do not
expect it. In Figure 10.13, the wall behind the subject is not sig-
nificantly farther from the strobe than the subject himself. We
might expect to have the same mix of strobe and ambient light
on everything in the picture.
Notice, however, that the strobe and the fluorescent light
come from different directions. The strobe casts a shadow on
the wall, but the fluorescent light illuminates the shadow and
makes it green.
Fluorescent Lighting
10.13
Because the
fluorescent light illuminates the
shadow that the strobe casts
on the wall, the shadow will be
green in a color photograph.
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The Remedies
Both mixed and unmixed light situations are common, and it is
important to be able to handle both of them. We use a slightly
different remedy for each.
Correcting mixed colors. Mixed color situations are relatively
easy to handle because the improper illumination that results
from them is uniform throughout the scene. In other words,

the entire scene is lit by light that has the same color balance.
The color balance of the whole picture will be wrong, but all
parts of the scene will be wrong in the same way.
Correcting color while shooting. It is this uniformity of
error that makes the problem so simple to correct. The cam-
era will probably fix it for you. If it doesn’t, it will be close
enough that a slight warming or cooling of the image will fix
it. The result will be a picture that has the correct color
balance and in which colors within the scene reproduce in a
standard, or realistic, way.
Correcting color after the picture is shot. Because any
color-balance problems are uniform when mixed colors are
used, it is relatively simple to make any required color
adjustments in postproduction. This gives you a useful
safety margin should you fail to get the proper correction
when you are shooting the picture. The color balance may
not be quite as good as a picture that was shot right to begin
with, but it is likely to be good enough that an experienced
viewer cannot tell the difference without a side-by-side
comparison of the two.
One caution is due. Beware of those scenes that include a
light source or the mirror reflection of one. These extremely
bright areas record in the picture as white highlights, regardless
of the color of the light producing them. These highlights may
then take on the color of whatever correction is used to remedy
the rest of the scene. You can deal with this problem, but it
requires more than the straightforward color adjustment most
people know how to do in their image editing software and is a
topic too far from photographic lighting to deal with in this
book. Even worse, only the best offset printers have prepress

departments who can deal with it. The way to be sure to get it
right is to either correct the color while shooting the picture or
to compose it so that it does not contain any such troublesome
highlights.
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