This has bothered me for years, please help!

[eccles030]

Hi everyone,

Seems like a good community here so wanted to ask people's advice on something if possible. I've always owned Canon Digital SLR's for taking product images at our company (chocolates, box shots etc) but have a big problem. The images looks great on the camera's LCD screen but when I import them onto my Mac, the once crystal 'white' background I took the image on goes very dark, almost dark peach and needs re-touching to to brighten the white up.

Is there anything I'm doing wrong? I have adequate lighting when the photo was taken with professional lights etc and I'm importing the images sometimes through Aperture and sometimes in Apple's iPhoto depending which machine I'm on (pretty sure this isn't the cause though).

The camera I have now is a Canon DS126151.

I'm going crazy having to lighten everything all the time. Surely if my lighting is good on the original then I shouldn't need to manually lighten them all the time?!

Many thanks in advance for your help.

Regards,
Mark

[karenoliver]

Is it because the white balance is wrong? Are you using tungsten lighting? Also maybe use a grey card for metering? I am no expert but am learning studio stuff at college at the moment and my shots used to have a peachy background when the white balance was wrong and I was underexposing.

[Forseti]

Originally Posted by eccles030

Hi everyone,

The camera I have now is a Canon DS126151.

I've never heard of this model - is it the 400D? Anyway, imo Karen is absolutely right in that the white balance is set wrong - you've probably got the camera set on automatic white balance. The solution is to either find out the temperature of the lighting you are using and set the camera up accordingly e.g. Tungsten if tungsten lighting is being used or, again as Karen says - purchase and use a grey card. Take one shot with the grey card in the scene and later use the eye-dropper tool in software to read the white balance off this card followed by pasting the resultant WB setting to other images in the series if all under the same lighting etc.

[flake]

I wonder if you have the monitor calibrated, because if the camera is showing that the background is white on the LCD screen and the monitor is not, the most likely cause is that the monitor is introducing colours of its own. You should check this before adjusting the white balance.

You should be able to check your exposure using the histogram in post processing, so just check that you are getting that right. Another question I have is, Is the LCD image before you take the shot or afterwards?

[cosmicma]

it could be the colour of the room your studio is in

if your not lighting up the background to compensate for the room it will influence the colour of a white background
iv'e had the same problem where the pure white background had a blueish tint and it was down to the colour of the walls in the room