Context: I took some photos with friends. It was evening and we were inside, only one weak light on. Possibly incandescent bulb but I didn’t check. Going by memory it was quite dark (I went up to 6400 ISO…) and the light was very warm.
Now here’s my problem. The camera had set the color temperature at around 2900/3000 K. The photos were IMO too reddish.
So I tried adjusting it with Lightroom’s “eye dropper”, selecting a wall as reference for “white” (Not my house, but I think it was white). Temperature went to about 2400K, but they were now too cold and the photos’ joyous atmosphere vaporized. We were celebrating and having a poker with alcohol, yet they now looked like photos taken in a morgue…
I don’t think there was something objectively wrong, but the feeling is not the one I had while shooting them. Nor the one I wanted people to have while looking at them.
I manually changed the photos to about 2650K (didn’t touch “tint”, only “temperature”). They didn’t look too orange, but at the same time they didn’t feel depressing. I think it was the best compromise I could get.
How do you guys do it? I’m no professional so I went by feeling. What would you have done in this case? Should I have left Lightroom’s auto choice, despite the “morgue effect”?
P.S. Shooting RAW with a Nikon D3500, in case it matters.
I adjust by artist interpretation. If I take pictures on cold winter day with gray skies and maybe wind blowing strong, I may turn the temperature down to make the shot feel colder, like the viewer was there.
Stars at night are daylight so I set my K between 4500-5000 or Daylight for settings.
I forget to set my white balance to flash when using one, the pictures may come out too bluish sometimes so up the warmth in the pictures.
For sunsets, you have that warth feeling so I may bump the K by 250 to 500 to provide the sunset light to the whole screen. Just a tinge of sunlight all over the ground.
Use Lightroom to adjust the picture anyway you want. You want all your picture to have an orange/purplish tint, do it for a picture, then create a preset to apply it to any pictures you want.
Basically I set my picture control to Neutral for my Z6 and the pictures will look very dull in Lightroom. From there, I adjust them to how I want the viewer to feel the scene. But I could just as easily convert to black and white or reverse colors, ie make my reds become, blue, greens to red, etc.
You can do whatever you want to your pictures. Lightroom is a tool, nothing more.