Help with camera settings

[Coraya]

Last night was beautiful. Half the sky was a string tint of yellow and the opposite side was very very dark. It made for a beautifully odd night sky.

I couldn't take an accurate photo of the color no matter what. Is there something I can do? Am I missing something?

Here's a picture that looks nothing like what I actually saw last night.

It was a darker yellow with a lot of detail to it. And the way it reflected onto the Earth was gorgeous, but I missed the opportunity to take a good picture forever

 

[Qc_Anubis]

Looks like you had the sepia filter on......

 

[Coraya]

the sepia filter gave a slightly more accurate interpretation that's why

 

[patruns]

So is this with or without the sepia filter?

 

[Coraya]

the picture is with the Sepia filter. without it, the color is no where near accurate

 

[Coraya]

here's two pictures. the lighter one is without changing any settings. the darker one is adjusting how much light the G6 lens is absorbing or whatever. the darker one is closer to my skin tone but still nowhere near the actually color. sort of golden brown is the right color

 

[Coraya]

Forgot to add the pictures like a dummy. here's two pictures. the lighter one is without changing any settings. the darker one is adjusting how much light the G6 lens is absorbing or whatever. the darker one is closer to my skin tone but still nowhere near the actually color. sort of golden brown is the right color

 

[Coraya]

Ok here. Everything is blue in the picture but in reality the colors are far from whatever my camera sees.

 

[patruns]

the picture is with the Sepia filter. without it, the color is no where near accurate

It would be helpful it you put pictures of each of the same scene for comparison.

 

[LeoRex]

Oh, cameras have a hell of a time with monitors. There's something about the backlight, dunno, never looked into it much... but monitors seem to confuse the hell out of the white balance function. The picture on the monitor goes way into blue and everything else outside of the frame gets punched way too yellow.

 

[Coraya]

But what about my scenery situation. The accuracy was horrendous.

 

[LeoRex]

But what about my scenery situation. The accuracy was horrendous.

Only thing I can think of is the specific scenario (dusk is actually particularly tricky) confused the software and it couldn't set the correct color temp. I've seen situations where this happens. The walls of one of the rooms in my house has a subtle yellow paint... with white wainscotting on the bottom half. At night, under the glow of warm lighting, every digital camera I've used completely borks the color... everything goes yellow. I can fix it by manually tweaking the color temp (if the camera app I am using at the time supports that).

 

[Tim1954]

Problem being is that our eyes (brain) look at a scene in a room with flouro lights and we know that people are really not that awful shade of blue, so we adjust and "see" "normal" colours. The camera faithfully records what it sees... Hence the filters we use on our cameras

 

[dkking]

for accurate colors, try the GCAM HDR+ i thought it could reproduce better accurate colors than the LG Camera generally

 

[dkking]

you could temporarily shoot in raw just in case, you may be able to use photo editing software to get all the colors right

 

[bobdob]

This is always going to be a problem with automatic white balance.

Basically, a digital camera has to know what "white" is in order to render the colors accurately. Fancy cameras have a manual white balance mode you can use - you point the camera at something that is true white and tell the camera it's white. But normally, some assumptions are made about the things we are likely to photograph (in other words, the camera software knows what color sunlight normally is) in order to automatically set the white balance. And normally it works reasonably well (we are not normally that picky either).

When you take a picture of an unusual tint, those assumptions are not right and so the white balance assumed by the camera is wrong and the colors are not quite right. And since the whole point of the shot is the unusual color, you notice it.

To work around this, you can shoot in RAW mode as dkking said - the white balance processing is not done on the raw image, and you can adjust it in your photo editing software. You can tweak the color temperature on the processed jpeg also, but not necessarily with as good results.

On the G6 if you use manual mode, you can also manually adjust the color temperature while shooting and see "on the fly" whether the colors look right.

 

[Coraya]

thank you for the helpful replies guys. I'll try all of it out