Created: 2007-07-02 10:11:46
By: Luke Bayler (Mycoholic)
Summary: RE: White Balance

Thanks for the pointers and the link!

Created: 2007-06-29 17:21:56
By: Douglas Smith (douglas)
Summary: White Balance

You should check your camera for an “auto-white balance” setting, where you can set the white balance to a given white source. I use white paper (the “>100 brightness” copy paper is cheap and plentiful at office stores), and have the camera set the white balance off the paper for the ambient light, before taking photos of mushrooms. I found that for most digital cameras, if you are using mostly natural light, but taking photos in the shadows, you get most of your light from the sky, and that gives the photo a blue cast.

Also, if it looks white to you, it really looks blue to me, which makes me wonder if your monitor is color calibrated. I try to keep my monitor calibrated for gamma and color, so white is white on the screen. The web page I use for info on this is:

http://www.normankoren.com/...

Which makes me wonder if you have your monitor set to a low color temp., so you get blue images to compensate. Do other photos on here, like some of mine, look yellow to you?

Douglas

Created: 2007-06-29 09:41:59
By: Luke Bayler (Mycoholic)
Summary: RE: Really that blue?

Looking at the fungus, the flesh in the photo is white, and the spore mass is purplish. I set the white balance on the camera to incandescent, but come to think of it, I should’ve set it to fluorescent. To me the photo looks quite good. :) But there is some shadowyness going on with the wall. Though I compared the photo to the live fungus and to my eyes it came out pretty well. I’ll mess with the white balance and see what happens next time. Normally I take my photos outside and the white balance isn’t too much of a problem because I’m not dealing with artificial light. I don’t think has too much of a blueness problem, judging just by the white flesh, but like I said, I’ll monkey with the white balance a bit more next time. Thanks for the feedback!

Created: 2007-06-29 08:27:32
By: Douglas Smith (douglas)
Summary: Really that blue?

Is the context of the sample really that blue? The overall picture looks blue, and the main blue of the context seems to be the same blue as the wall in the background of the photo.

Either the wall is that shade of blue, and so is the fungus, or the photo has an overall blue cast to it.

Douglas