What can be done about mixed lighting?

[sk66]

I'm talking about situations where you have no control over the light sources. Like tungsten lighting mixing with flourescent etc.

I recently tried to take some night pictures of a very old train station which had many overhead tungsten lights, but then every once in a while one of the lights had a flourescent bulb in it, and in some situations there was halide lighting spilling into the scene. I did not want to flood the area with supplimental lighting...it would remove the "night atmosphere", why bother.

All I could come up with was to WB for the predominate lighting (tungsten) but this resulted in patches of bluer/white light from the flourescent and green areas from the halides (I'm not absolutely positive what the "other" light types were, just that they would not balance with the rest). I tried to find an "average WB" to no avail....

Is there any solution to this other than extensive PP?

[RexK_Cozumel]

take a bb gun and shoot out the lights.. no really you have to do a lot of pp work... with two different light sources you might be able to average the WB but with three very different sources you are left with PP work.

[jdepould]

I wouldn't worry too much about it, since that's how it actually looked. I'd compensate for the predominant lighting and let the other stuff fall as it may.

[sk66]

Originally Posted by jdepould

I wouldn't worry too much about it, since that's how it actually looked. I'd compensate for the predominant lighting and let the other stuff fall as it may.

It didn't look like that to me...
The eye, at least mine, seems to be quite adept at applying differential WB...I never "see" a green/blue/orange cast due to lighting...It apparently only exists in captured images...

[jdepould]

Originally Posted by sk66

It didn't look like that to me...
The eye, at least mine, seems to be quite adept at applying differential WB...I never "see" a green/blue/orange cast due to lighting...It apparently only exists in captured images...

Some of it is recalibrating your eyes. You become more sensitive to changes in color temperature with experience.

[Tiberius]

The easiest and most effective solution is to convert to B/W...

[wanelad]

Why not show the pictures so then a judgement can be made from what is seen also would present more as an educational tool

[Taallyn]

In mixed lighting like that you pretty much have to pick your predominate light source and then let the others do whatever they do. You can gel your flashes for the predominate light, which should take care of a lot of problems. Another trick I've read in Joe McNalley's book is that he would gel his flash for fluorescent and then put a magenta gel over his lens to bring the flesh tones back to where he wanted them.