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Here’s a scenario that some new photographers face, but don’t know why it happens. They get some new studio strobes for the first time and start taking pictures. Everything is going great until they get back to the computer and look at the images and realize that all the pictures came out blue! They try to save the shots in Photoshop but it can only do so much. The batch of photos is lost. They chalk it up to a “learning experience” but don’t really know what they did wrong.

The Problem

The problem lies in the fact that studio strobes have a halogen modeling light bulb in them, and it’s a completely different kind from the tungsten bulb that fires when you press the shutter. They have totally different color temperatures, which means that the white balance of your camera differs depending on which light you shoot under.

So what does this mean to you? If you’re shooting with the modeling lights on, and you have your camera set to auto white balance, it will often times base it’s white balance decision on the modeling bulbs. Then when the strobe fires, that wrong white balance will be applied to the photograph.

Here’s an example of what a picture would look like under these conditions. Not exactly the true to life skin tones you would hope for.

The Solution

You have a couple of really easy solutions to this problem.

• Set your camera’s white balance setting to “flash”. This is a simple fix, but if you forget to do it, you have screwed up pictures. On the other hand, if you forget to set it back to auto after the shoot, your pictures taken later will be screwed up too.
• Shoot RAW. Now it doesn’t matter what white balance you choose, because you can always change it using software. This is the safest route but more time consuming. The example image I use here was taken as a RAW, and to generate the examples, I simply changed the white balance and exported it twice.

Here’s what the image looks like with the white balance set to “flash”. The blue might be cool in some artistic senses if that’s what you want, but this is probably a little more to your liking.