fluorescent bulbs in a library location

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diego80

Active member
I was reading in Blain Brown's book on lighting that regular fluorescent bulbs show some color problem when shot with a camera.

So I was wondering: planning to shot a library scene (where I can exploit a very powerful and broad light- I'll post the clip I recorded today just below) will I have to replan the shot and discard this whole scene??

I certainly cant switch all the 64 bulbs with color correct ones ..
 
There's no such thing as a regular fluorescent anymore. Most tend to be passable, a bit blue at times, but you rarely come across the awful green tint fluorescents of a few years ago.
 
diego80 said:
I was reading in Blain Brown's book on lighting that regular fluorescent bulbs show some color problem when shot with a camera.

So I was wondering: planning to shot a library scene (where I can exploit a very powerful and broad light- I'll post the clip I recorded today just below) will I have to replan the shot and discard this whole scene??

I certainly cant switch all the 64 bulbs with color correct ones ..
Click to expand...

You don't have to. Nearly all modern cameras that have a manual white balance function work on more than just the orange-blue axis. All that I've used also handle the magenta-green axis, and others besides.

A manual white balance won't magically make the spectrum of a fluorescent continuous, so you're still going to get some artifacts from holes in the spectrum. But the spikes should be mostly handled, including green and blue spikes.

If you didn't do a manual white balance before shooting that scene, auto white balance on many cameras handle this if there's something neutral in the scene for it to work with, so maybe and maybe not. If instead you used a manual Kelvin number (orange-blue axis only), then you baked in the green spike. You may well be able to correct it in post in a color correction step(s), but it's usually a PITA and can take quite a while to correct. And there's no guarantee. Is it cheaper and more time efficient to reshoot? Only you can answer that.
 
Liam Hall said:
There's no such thing as a regular fluorescent anymore. Most tend to be passable, a bit blue at times, but you rarely come across the awful green tint fluorescents of a few years ago.
Click to expand...

I want to live in your world! Sadly in my world there's plenty of 20+ year old fluorescent tubes that make you look like a space alien. And even more sadly, new ones do it to. Especially the "contractor special" aka "building fluorescent" bulbs from the big box stores. Amazingly cheap, and worth every penny.
 
On bigger jobs we would indeed change out all the bulbs for movie tone lamps. That said, your question about having to discard the whole scene is a bit far fetched. You be the judge - do you like what you see? Just because something less conventional was done (and even that's debatable since not everyone has the means to change out 64 fluorescent lamps), that doesn't mean you automatically need to go and reshoot. All that really matters is if what you got was acceptable, and it may very well be fine if there's not too much daylight in the mix.
 
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