How to Adjust White Balance for the Most Common Types of Street Lights
You’ve probably noticed that most of the city’s street lights are not entirely pure white. Some emit a warm orange color, while others – cold and green. When you’re taking photographs, it can be annoying if you don’t want colors to distract from your scene, but the types of light used are so common that you can easily compensate for them.
On PetaPixel, photographer Alex Zhu recently took a look at the three most common types of street lights and what you can do in post-processing to achieve better white balance. When the entire street is lined with one font, you can adjust the color temperature and tint in the photo so that all the street lights appear pure white. Keep in mind that this doesn’t necessarily make your photo look better – it makes the scene colder in some cases. But knowing the three types of light that you will often encounter will give you an edge when editing photographs. For example, orange lamps are most likely high pressure sodium lamps that you can easily set to:
The dramatic drop in color temperature through the use of color temperatures in the low 2000s makes photos more balanced and pleasing, while retaining the familiar and cozy warmth that the amber glow provides.
Zhu also notes that it is quite common in real life that there will be multiple types of light in the frame, so you rarely find ideal circumstances in which you can compensate for each individual light. Moreover, there is art in it; perfect white balance does not exist. You have to set up the scene to support whatever you want to call. Read Zhu’s article to learn about other types of common street lights, including metal halide and mercury.
How to set white balance for the most common types of street lights. PetaPixel