I have a canon 5dii and was wondering if anyone had any advice on using CTO vs CTS for colour balancing in tungsten conditions with speedlites? Or do you "suck it and see"? Or have you never tried the other? I've just heard it said that CTO can be a little red (which in theory I could fix with a custom profile if necessary...)
I'm in your same boat. I currently use CTOs but I just bought some CTS gels. Canon yields such strong red/orange tones in general, that I think CTS will be helpful.
I used CTO of various strengths with my 5DII for a good while and was pretty happy with it. I read Niel VanN recommend CTS and gave it a try, and I like it better!
Wondered about these, but decided to stick with shooting RAW + setting Kelvin value in heavily tinted areas. For everything else, there's AWB =). Every ballroom is different and the level of yellowish/tungsten light can vary. I find that carrying and dealing with multiple strengths of gels to get the desired result can start to become tedious.
Saad Syed wrote:
Wondered about these, but decided to stick with shooting RAW + setting Kelvin value in heavily tinted areas. For everything else, there's AWB =). Every ballroom is different and the level of yellowish/tungsten light can vary. I find that carrying and dealing with multiple strengths of gels to get the desired result can start to become tedious.
I concur.
I just gel to get it in the ballpark.
Beyond that, and you will drive yourself crazy.
As long as your bride looks good, and the background doesn't look too cold you're good.
Saad Syed wrote:
Wondered about these, but decided to stick with shooting RAW + setting Kelvin value in heavily tinted areas. For everything else, there's AWB =). Every ballroom is different and the level of yellowish/tungsten light can vary. I find that carrying and dealing with multiple strengths of gels to get the desired result can start to become tedious.
On the multiple strengths of gel point, I'm not suggesting having 20 of them.
1 will get you 50% of the way there
2 will get you 75% of the way there
3 will get you 85% of the way there
4 will get you 90% of the way there
Given the diminishing returns, I'd say 3/4 was worth it and after that it wasn't worth it.
brett maxwell wrote:
I used CTO of various strengths with my 5DII for a good while and was pretty happy with it. I read Niel VanN recommend CTS and gave it a try, and I like it better!
I'm wondering if it will be a problem for me. I have a colorchecker passport and will be producing custom profiles. If I'm not wrong, the colour checker should sort out the difference, in the foreground / flash lit areas at least. I know the background will therefore have a little less red... but I'm wondering if that's not a good thing for me anyway?
PhilDWedding wrote:
Will be interesting to see how we all get on then. I know I don't want strong red casts across my photos...
I sorta don't understand what red cast people are talking about I guess. I only get things to red when its underexposed.
I'm also an amateur astronomer/astrophotographer and we typically disassemble canon bodies and remove the IR filter from behind the CMOS glass to get the camera to see red much better.
Canons like to have red in the shadows. It's cool in the highlights but I see it in the shadows of skin tones a lot. All I do is make a new layer, ctrl+b and move the shadows slider into cyan about 6-10%.
The mids and highlights to me seem fine, but the shadows are more often than not too warm- this is an AWB btw. I have a setting on my camera for cool colors but i usually save that for my grungy stuff.
I noticed the same thing on my 40d and my 5d2... I can't remember how it was on my xti.
It really depends how much you want to match your ambient. Some people like having the background go super orange and don't gel at all. I slap a full CTS on in most reception situations and the background is still a bit warm, probably 2500k in most situations, while I'm shooting at 3200k. Then there's people that like in between and shoot with 1/2 CTS.
How much correction is a different discussion. Many people, myself included, think Canon over-saturates reds for skin tones, and many people then find CTS to be better than CTO.
I use 1/4's and 1/2's and it seems to work just fine. It's really just personal preference. Adjusting color in LR or PS is really not that big of a deal, regardless of which you use.
