Pointers with Actinic & Moonlight Shots

[Zibba]

Can someone give me some pointers on Actinic and/or Moonlight shots? I can't get anything to turn out. I'm shooting in RAW format, but not sure where to start with the settings.

Thanks.
- Z

[hypoxia]

What photo program will you use to edit the RAW images?

[Zibba]

I'm just starting to use Photoshop CS3 (but I'm such a noob with photoshop). I've been using Aperture for other shots. PS is so amazing...there are just too many functions and I don't know where to begin.

[Zibba]

Ok...it's night time for my reef. I'm trying to take moonlight pictures and all I get is over exposed blue blindness! lol

[morty]

Are you taking a white balance measurement before shooting? (Not sure how this would work under low-light conditions, but I'd think the camera might cooperate)

[Zibba]

I'll have to give that a try for sure. I didn't do a white balance under the moonlights since I was taking the pictures in RAW format. I've tried doing the white balance when shooting in JPEG format before with a different camera and it was even worse. I'm kind of frustrated with it right now, so I'll try again tomorrow instead.

Maybe a reef under "moonlights" are just something that you have to see in person to appreciate.

[zryder]

the reason they are looking so over exposed, is your camera is trying to set its exposure to an even, standard 18% grey. the blue is setting this all off. try setting your exposure 1 stop lower and see what that will get you.
as far as white balance when in raw, you can still do that, take a shot of a white card (sadly, in your tank, under the lights), and then tell photoshop that is a white card.. i have never tried it that way, although it would be a very intiresting experiment..

[morty]

You could attach a plastic white lid from some kind of food container (e.g. yogurt, sour cream, etc.) to a long piece of rigid air tube using hot melt (the rigid air tube would then act as a handle). You could then temporarily place the lid in the tank next to whatever you're going to shoot, to get a white balance reading under that lighting (I'd try to tilt the lid a little so it's well-illluminated by the tank lighting).

[Zibba]

I'll try to set the white balance using that approach.

How would I go about setting the white balance using photoshop?

[morty]

Not sure how that would work because I've never tried it. But I would guess it involves including on object of a known neutral white (white card) somewhere in your image (to be cropped out later) and after importing the image into Photoshop, you use the white balance tool (which probably turns the cursor into a sampling device) on that white object, which then instructs Photoshop to adjust the curves and render that object a true white. The rest of the image is corrected in the process. I would lean towards setting the white balance on the camera prior to shooting, but both methods may work equally well. (Downside to doing it in photoshop is the requirement of the white object in the shot.)

Edit: I guess you could also take two shots -- one with the white object, and one without. You could then probably copy/paste the curve corrections from the image with the white object into the image without it, this would save you the trouble of having to crop it out.

[hypoxia]

When you're opening a raw file in photoshop it will give you a popup screen with all sorts of adjustments you can make. That's fun. However, it DOES NOT COMPENSATE for failing to set the white balance in your camera in the first place. There is NEVER compensation for proper camera settings; you can only tweak what you have, not improve it significantly.

I explained the concept behind white balancing in a different thread. It would certainly work here as well. :)

Bear in mind that in Photoshop there are always 3-4 ways to do something. Photoshop, especially the CS versions, is designed for many different ways of thinking. A photographer thinks differently from a graphic designer thinks differently from an engineer thinks differently from a web designer thinks differently from a web developer thinks differently from a document creator.

[capman]

I have not worked with RAW much, but my understanding was that in-camera white balance settings affect your jpegs, but not your RAW files. After all, the whole point of RAW files is to just take what the sensor gives you without any in-camera manipulations that might be irreversible on the computer. When you take your file to the computer, you then apply the settings for white-balance, sharpening, contrast that your camera might have done for a jpeg. But with RAW you are not stuck with a bad decision for these settings that you might be stuck with if they had been done in-camera.

Manipulations of RAW files cannot change bad focus or grossly incorrect exposures, of course, but I'm pretty sure that all of the other camera settings are shifted to the computer rather than being done in the camera.