Shooting colour at night

Night poses special problems for colour photography. It’s not the level of illumination that’s the problem, but the colour of the lighting. If you shoot in a busy city centre, you may have a mixture of tungsten lights, fluorescent lamps, yellow/orange streetlamps and even multicoloured neon. How are you supposed to reconcile all these with a single white balance setting? Our advice would be not to try. This is one situation where your camera’s auto white balance should just be left to get on with it. Only if the colours look completely wrong should you worry about taking over manually.

Different light sources

It’s not possible to compensate for every single light source, and sometimes the colour of the light doesn’t fall neatly at a point on the warm-cool colour temperature scale. White balance adjustments work by shifting the whole spectrum of the light source up or down the scale; they rely on the light having a full spectrum of colours, but simply shifted one way or the other. Some light sources don’t have a full spectrum of colours, and a prime example is orange streetlamps: they look orange because that’s all there is – no blue, no green – and it’s impossible to correct orange street lighting to produce a full range of colours. Fluorescent lighting is the other oddity, because it contains excess green. Digital cameras deal with this using one or more dedicated ‘fluorescent’ settings; these increase the levels of magenta (green’s complementary colour) to restore a natural-looking colour balance.

How do you get an accurate colour balance at night, with a mixture of light sources? You could try matching the white balance to the main light source, but for bright street scenes like this your camera’s auto white balance will often find the best compromise.

Manual white balance

Where you have more than one type of light source in a night shot, you could try matching the white balance to the dominant lighting. There are two ways of going about this. You could judge the scene by eye, identifying what look like tungsten or fluorescent light sources, and choosing a white balance preset to match, or you could use a ‘grey card’ to measure and save a custom white balance value. Actually, it doesn’t need to be a grey card at all; the important thing is that it’s neutral in colour, so a sheet of white paper would do in an emergency, or even a black and white magazine or newspaper page. You need to hold the card under the dominant light source, capture and store the white balance reading and then use this custom setting for the rest of your shots. The best bet is to shoot in RAW mode, if your camera supports it, so that you can choose another white balance setting if your manual calibration doesn’t produce the results you want.