Correcting WB with Gel

[Edgar]

Hi guys

There are a lot of wooden furnitures in our house (mostly dark, mahogany coloured wood), and everytime when the photos are taken with the flash, the images turned out very red.

What do I need to do in terms of settings and would using gel on the speedlite help to balance out the colour better? If so, what coloured gel should be used?

Thanks.

[ricktas]

try a grey card and set a custom white balance.

[ehor]

Post up a sample of what's happening?

[hoffy]

If using flash, I would just set the WB to 5600K

[bigdazzler]

do what hoffy says, set WB to 5600K (Daylight balance) .. gels are usually used on speedlights for color correction where there is a mixed light source .. say ambient late afternoon sunlight and a flash.

And if youre specifically photographing the wooden furniture, try and bounce the flash wherever possible, direct flash will cause badly blown hotspots, and they will stand out on dark wood in particular ..

[TOM]

you need to balance out the flash light with ambient light. what lighting are you shooting under, flouro or tungsten?

[Edgar]

I'm mainly photographing my young niece when she's in the main living area. Her photos turn out alright because she's only 1.5yo and her skin tone are fairly fair, however there is adults in the picture, the skin tones gets really bad with the lightings.

We have tungsten lighting in the living area + cream colour wall and mahogany wood furnitures around. When I bounce the flash, all the light that bounces off the furniture creates a very red-ish skin colour.

Is there a fix to this, or do we have a bad ambient in our living area which is not ideal for potrait photographs?

[bigdazzler]

We have tungsten lighting in the living area

have you tried setting your WB to Tungsten ?? If so what happens ?? .. its much easier to diagnose if you post a picture and show us exactly whats happening.

[Edgar]

This is the original unrendered image, converted from RAW to JPEG via LR.

You cannot see the furniture as it is on the surrounding, but when I bounce my flash over the ceiling, it is casting this warm redish colour over the subject.

I hope I am not seeing this because of my uncalibrated monitor, but a read on the histogram did show a fair amount of reds.

[habro]

Put your WB to Tungsten/Incandescent & put a CTO gel over your flash (probably a 1/2 CTO will do it)

[pollen]

What's happening is the mahogony furniture is reflecting light, so it forms a colour cast on the photo. As Rick suggests, either take a CWB or just correct it in RAW manually