I'm going to be stuck using Tungsten Halogen Lights for a small portrait job next day or so, Can anyone tell me what the best method for getting good portrait results with these type of lights might be, I am mainly concerned with skin color and white balance issues.

as far as WB, a true white card is easy to find and ranges from $7 or so up to $40 and up-chuck gardner uses a white terry towel for his WBs, so you have plenty of options

as far as the best way to use these lights, just use them as you would with strobes-decide how you want to capture your subject, choose some sort of lighting pattern, etc.-is there something more fundamental that you're wondering about?

daniel

Daniel,

FYI, I use a Kodak Gray Card for WB... The white terry towel is for evaluation of exposure only

Image1:

If you can't use a gray card for custom WB then the best approach would be to use the tungsten WB preset. It might not be perfect, but will be close and keep the WB the same shot-to-shot. Don't use AWB which changes WB shot to shot.

Shot RAW. Period.

Use an Expodisc and set a custom color temperature, then warm it up slightly to compensate for the cold look of skin tones under tungsten.

Thanks to everyone for their imput! I just have two questions. I am not a big Raw Shooter, If I use JPEG setting will that create a bigger problem with these lights? and also Camey mentioned Tungsten causing a cold tones! I thought it was the opposite the skin tones were warmer in tungsten? Basically from what I am hearing as long as I use a custom white balance I should not have a problem correct?

Thanks
John

Tungsten will cause to warm even yellow-brown pictures if not corrected. Small bulbs have lower temperature and 2900 K is more realistic than 3200 K.
Definitely, custom WB on white or grey will serve you best if you don't want to shoot RAW.

The problem with tungsten vs daylight and flash is that the camera captures images with red, green, and blue filters over sensor sites. Tungsten light is rich in red and green (red+green = yellow) but almost devoid of blue. So to get proper WB, regardless of how it is set, the camera must amplify the signal of the blue sensor sites much more than the red and green ones. In the process of amplifying the signal the base noise level is also amplified. That's why tungsten-lit images are tend to have more noise, especially in the shadows where there is less signal, especially at higher ISOs which also boosts the amplification.

Shooting in RAW provides a bit more dynamic range and the ability to change the WB after shooting without degrading image quality. Usually the correction needed is to make the color balance more blue, which will exacerbate the blue channel noise problem more in a JPG than in RAW. You should learn to use RAW. If you have a new computer and Photoshop there is really no workflow penalty for using RAW. Files are opened in Adobe Camera Raw first which allows adjustment of WB and exposure before opening in Photoshop for other editing.

Given the choice I would use indirect (northern) window light or shoot outdoors rather than tungsten. The ISO needed would be about the same (400 should work) and the color balance would be better in all channels resulting in far less noise. The character of the lighting would also be a huge improvement.