Miniature Photography: Color of Light

I've been taking pictures of my miniatures with a Nikon Coolpix 995 that I've had for a while. I have a built in TV cabinet that I've cleared out to use as a photo studio. I bought a collapsable light tent with 2 halogen lights and added a 3rd light overhead. The camera sits on a tripod. Here's a picture of my photo area. The camera has a couple of light settings in manual mode and I thought it would be interesting to post the raw output of those settings so you can see how my camera interprets light.

Light Colors

Here's the automatic light setting

There is a preset light setting where it will measure the lighting and apply those settings to subsequent pictures.

Cloudy setting

Incandescent setting

Flourscent setting

Fine light setting. To be honest, I'm not really sure what this does.

Overall, I found this exercise to be interesting as I never knew why my photos always came out reddish. Now, instead of using the automatic settings, I always use a manual setting with the preset light option.

Post Processing Effects on Light Colors

Here's a sequence of images taken under the automatic light setting, then modified with the curves function in Paint Shop Pro, and lastly with the brightness upped just a bit.

The same processing sequence with the light settings on Incandescent ...

... and lastly the same sequence using the preset light settings

Notes

Last updated	11/23/08
Author	Michael Kan
Pre-requisites	None
Related Articles	Photographing Miniatures