Convert indoor studio to golden light

[chauncey]

I do studio stuff using LED lighting which has a WB, as measured by an X-Rite card, of 2700.
Moving that card outside at a golden hour produces a WB of 3800.

Through experimenting it would appear that, with a properly exposed image, if ya want to
replicate that golden light using an studio scene with LED lighting...using levels, simply drop
the green by 10% and the blue by 20% without changing the red color.

Looking forward to any and all comments.

[chauncey]

I would have assumed that someone would have explained the error of my ways.

[jcuknz]

I think it is a matter of choice ... my first thought would have been to buy a conversion filter for the camera that were made in the old days for people using film. But so many things are easier to do in the computer these days if you got the solution your way then why not use it.

[Shadowman]

William,

Are you trying to replicate golden light streaming through a window or an outdoor scene during golden light? I would think the former would be much easier.

[chauncey]

Merely trying to replicate indoor studio LED lighting to imitate golden hues.

[xpatUSA]

Merely trying to replicate indoor studio LED lighting to imitate golden hues.

If you have temperature & tint WB setting in camera, or if your editor has something like this . . .



. . . then you could get a similar but easily repeatable effect, perhaps saved as a Custom WB setting.

The main difficulty is in the difference between the differently-shaped spectral emission curves of your LEDs and "golden hour" daylight, which means that the best you could get would be an approximation, rather than an "imitation".

[arith]

I've tried using OpticVerve VirtualPhotographer using the sunset setting but it doesn't look right to me.

Danube Canal taken in Summer at 0716 hrs approximately.

I know it's outdoors but indoors with LED would be the same wouldn't it, take a correct WB image then process it. I suppose I was just interested to see if I could fake sunset convincingly.

[Ken MT]

To me a sunset would be more directional. Your image only appears warmer.

[TonyW]

I did some experiments on an outdoor scene. With the colour balance adjustment layer in Photoshop, there was a golden shift with an increase in red and a smaller increase in green (with fixed luminance) which is equivalent to reducing the blue and reducing the green less. However, to duplicate the golden hour look, the change in colours needs to be distributed differently in different parts of the picture and I think that may be the difficulty in general.

[Manfred M]

This question was posted while I was in transit back home, so I'll add my thoughts a couple of days late.

Let's look at the characteristics of the lighting conditions that occur close to sunset:

Sunset colours are effectively a mixed light situation, you have a combination of low colour temperature (which are responsible for the yellow / red) as the light cuts through a very large amount of atmosphere as the sun is positioned close to the horizon. The sunlight hits dust, moisture and nitrogen and oxygen atoms, which gives the overhead sky the high colour temperature; blue. This indirect light also hit your subjects. The direct light will be highly directional; really a side light that casts long and soft shadows.

So getting a sunset effect requires a combination of these two light sources, one of which is highly directional. I doubt this can be easily done in post production.

It is possibly achievable in a studio? I haven't tried so I don't know if this will work or not, as we try to replicate the lighting conditions described above. Using a orange gelled light as your key light and use a highly directional light modifier set almost at a horizontal position would be part of the solution. Getting the shadows to be soft and look right could be tricky.

The second part would be a large, soft, diffuse blue light source from above. I'd try using a large blue gelled softbox that is close to the subject to create that lighting condition. Where I see the technical issue is trying to set the light sources so that the overall scene actually looks light sunset. That would be the tricky part.