Yellow or greeny colour instead of brite white

[leedsfan]

Dear all,
I have signed up here hoping you can help me, I run a busness on ebay selling sunglasses, I have taken digital images for a while using s Finepix 40i ( i know its quite old now).
I have recently bought a light tent and use 2 * 23w flouresent coiled lights on either side of the light tent , i have taken various shots adjusting the EV from 0.3 to 1.5 (only available in increments of 0.3)(0.6, 0.9, 1.2 etc) and adjusting the white balance on all the settings, HOWEVER i seem to be only getting a yellow background (pls see pics)

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/j.levey/sunnys%20(1).jpg

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/j.levey/sunnys.jpg

and nothing like a brilliant white image as per all the light5 cube websites
I am sorry if this is a stupid question, but i'd really love some help here, is it the lights i'm using they look ok to me, i'm hoping my camerea is faulty, asi simply cant get anything like a white background (only yellow or green) , DO YOU THINK its could be my camereas the lights or simply is it me , not destined to be a photograper

[Trevor Ash]

Hi!

Flourescent lights are green. Our eyes don't see it but the camera does. You said you played with the white balance on your camera. That's what you need to do. Is there a setting on the white balance for flourescent? If so, you will probably get best results using that setting.

If none of the white balance settings in the camera produce acceptable results you can try to correct your color in software but given the nature of your business I seriously dubt that's an acceptable option for you. Some photos will be easier to clean up that others.

Are you using strictly flourescent lights? Or are you mixing other lighting in there too? Is the room bright or dark when you take the photos? The reason I ask all this is that you really don't want to mix light sources that have different temperatures (tungsten, daylight, flourescent, etc). Your room with the photo tent should be as dark as possible and maybe even flip off the regular room lights when you're ready to take the exposure. That way, only the flourecent lights are being captured by the camera. This will make color correcting 100 times easier.

In my opinion, if your camera has a white balance setting of flourescent, and setting it to that mode doesn't give you good results, you either have to replace your camera with one that does, or find different lights that your camera works well with.

For what it's worth, some camera let you set the temperature in degrees kelvin in 100 degree increments or so. If you had a camera with a feature like that your worries wold probably be over. I don' think any point and shoots will have that feature though.

Oh, I just realized another solution I almost forgot about. Does your camera have an option for using a "Custom White Balance"? In this mode, you take a picture of something white (an empty light tent would be good) and you tell the camera to use that picture to determine white balance. The camera will magically adjust itself so that things white appear white. This is your best bet if your camera has this feature.

Your composition looks good, you appear to know what you're doing more than you might admit. I'm sure you find a good solution.

[Peter_AUS]

Looking at your image and as Trevor said in his reply, it all has to do with "White Balance". Taking the image into Photoshop and just clicking on white balance using the white eye dropper in Level, gives you a 50% improvement in the background towards white. As Trevor said, take an image using a white card, or a 18% grey card which would be better and use that as your reference point to get the balance correct.

What are you using to post process your images with, program wise to give us an idea of your work flow.

Probably you would be better off using something that gives you more control over the white balance of your images, something like a Canon G6 might be in your price range.

Remember you will get some colour scatter from the Sun Glasses as well, especially using a white background as well.

I don't think it is the light tent, I think it is a combination of the Flurescent Lights and your camera and it's capabilities.