WHY DO THE COLORS LOOK SO WEIRD?

It turns out that light comes in different "flavors."

It's called "color temperature." Daylight is blue. Most artificial lights are yellow. In fact, they’re even more blue, and even more yellow than you normally ever notice. When you're standing in an indoor space with windows, your brain tends to "auto correct" for the different colors of the lighting, and it actually does an amazingly good job of it. The indoor lighting may look a little warm to the eye – the outdoor a little cool, but when you take a photograph, the result can be completely unexpected. And surprisingly garish. The interior can come out an almost bug-light shade of orange while the daylight from the windows goes electric neon aquarium blue. Well, that's what I call it. :-)

Your digital camera has a setting called "White Balance." You can set it to correctly render the daylight (there's usually a little icon), or you can set it for the indoor lighting (often referred to as Incandescent or Tungsten). Luckily, it doesn't have to be that complicated because you can also choose an "Auto" setting, which I normally recommend for all of your exposures.

Using the daylight setting renders the view out the window with perfect color balance. But look what it does to the interior.

Using the tungsten setting causes the interior to render correctly. But now the view out the window has gone incredibly blue. And not a nice blue. It's more like one not found in nature.

The image above shows what the auto setting does. It sort of averages out the color, but you can still see that the interior is too yellow, and the view out the window is too blue.

YELLOW AND BLUE ARE OPPOSITES. IF YOU MIX THEM TOGETHER EQUALLY, THEY CANCEL EACH OTHER OUT AND THE RESULT IS A NEUTRAL GRAY. IF AN IMAGE IS TOO BLUE, YOU ADD YELLOW TO FIX IT. IF THE IMAGE IS TOO YELLOW, YOU ADD BLUE.

THE PROBLEM COMES UP WHEN BOTH KINDS OF LIGHT APPEAR IN THE SAME PHOTO.

The Edited Result

This beautiful kitchen features a predominantly neutral color scheme. The designer chose the palette, and it simply must come across in the photograph. The cabinets are white. Not off-white. Not tan. Not orange. But correcting the color of the interior results in a ghastly blue color from the windows which would have stuck out like a sore thumb (see above) if it had not ALSO been corrected.

Managing mixed lighting in an architectural photo is a job for the image editor. It is a challenge that I face in almost every image that I work with. Over the years, I have developed a number of special processing techniques that allow me to control the color to an extent that other photographers, even professionals do not always achieve. Bragging? Yeah, but color really is my forte. :-)

There are a number of ways to deal with mixed lighting, but the the way that usually works best for me involves a shooting technique that I teach to the photographers that I collaborate with. It's designed to make it possible for me to more precisely control the color in the final edited photograph. All you need to do is shoot with all the lights on, and then shoot again with all the lights off. It's that simple. You can easily do it on all of your interior photos.

Leave the white balance set to auto. If you are shooting RAW files, I will be able to reset the actual white balance during the editing process.

Resetting the white balance to tungsten makes the overall image more blue, but now the view out the window is way too blue.

In the lights-off exposure, the view out the window is not blue. I can layer these last two images together in Photoshop, to make the finished product.

THIS SORT OF COMPOSITE RENDERING IS AT THE HEART OF MY "SUPER DOUBLE SECRET SHOOTING TECHNIQUE." Check it out here if you think you're ready :-)

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