[UMDTERPS]

I am having difficulty in shooting music at night clubs. I currently use a Pentax K3, Sigma 17-50mm lens, and no flash. What technique do any of you use to make people not look like purple blobs when the lighting in doors is purple and there is a smoke machine running? There appears to be plenty of light when I was in there. What am I doing wrong?

I was using anywhere from 2.8-5f and 1600-3200 ISO. The club felt like there was plenty of light.

Below are a few pics of my disaster :

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Last edited by UMDTERPS; 02-07-2016 at 02:35 PM.

[mattt]

It's a white ballance issue. You might want to shoot at a particular temperature.

Below, two versions of same shot, fist is white balanced in post with LR eyedropper on Guitarists shirt, Second is the out of camera result... not as purple as yours, but I think it illustrates the point.

[LensBeginner]

+1 to mattt
Upshot: regulate WB carefully if you're shooting jpeg, it won't be perfect anyway if lights are shifting.
Even better, shoot RAW (that's what I do): it's like a life insurance policy.

[Adam]

Definitely shoot raw+. Multi-AWB helps with tricky lighting situations like these, so I'd go ahead and turn that on as well.

Adam
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[Na Horuk]

It's a white ballance issue. You might want to shoot at a particular temperature.

Definitely shoot raw+. Multi-AWB helps with tricky lighting situations like these, so I'd go ahead and turn that on as well.

Good advice there. I would also add that modern LED lights are really terrible for colour photography. You might want to desaturate the photo and make it black and white. This will give you all the detail and nice visuals, but without the distracting, oversaturated colours.

Problem with LED is that they have a very narrow lightwave spectrum, so even if you shoot raw and change WB in post, you are more limited than you would be if you shot in full daylight or full-spectrum lights.

[LensBeginner]

As a side note, I think you can get in trouble if you're shooting live music... don't you need a permit and make sure it's hunting season for that?

[bigdavephoto]

The red/purple led lights are the hardest to take photos of. Shoot RAW and play with saturation and see what the photos look like as black and white.

[stevebrot]

What technique do any of you use to make people not look like purple blobs when the lighting in doors is purple and there is a smoke machine running?

I do believe that under those condition, people do indeed look like purple blobs.

Now to be more serious. The comments regarding LED lights are very pertinent as are those regarding shooting RAW. I don't know how you are metering the scene, but is it possible you are clipping on the blue channel (i.e. overexposed)? You might want to try manual mode using settings from a spot reading of the performers keeping in mind your intent for skin values.


Steve

[rawr]

FYI, there is a long and rich history of discussion in Pentaxforums about the dreaded LED lighting. Here's one of the most useful threads:

https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/6-pentax-dslr-discussion/93809-modern-led...-problems.html

I shoot RAW, AWB, and take a few test shots in front of where I am shooting from time to time using a small grey card to capture a record of the lighting of the gig, which helps in figuring out later WB adjustments. I also will make use of the WB eye-dropper a lot in Lightroom to find a good WB point - oftentimes a reading off the metallic grey side of the singer's microphone does a good job. And if the LED colour cast is too strong I will drop the saturation of the colour as needed.

It's never possible - or even desirable, sometimes - to completely remove all the weird LED lighting colours in an image, so I usually prioritise getting the skin tones right, and let the rest of the scene follow whatever WB adjustments worked for the skin-tones.

[Sandy Hancock]

Shoot RAW. Slam the temperature and tint sliders to each extreme to see what works best, then adjust to get something natural. If all else fails - B&W with some fiddling with the colour channels usually produces something usable.

When shooting, be mindful of when the lights change to nasty purple and time your shots for when the colours are better.

[darylk]

I'm no expert in this regard, but I think attaching a colored lens filter (as was commonly used in b&w film photography in the old days) to counteract the extreme purple may help. Yellow is opposite of red, so maybe a yellow filter would pull the white balance a little in the right direction making further corrections in post processing easier and less extreme. This is a theory... I'm not certain.

[clackers]

I'm no expert in this regard, but I think attaching a colored lens filter to counteract the extreme purple may help. Yellow is opposite of red, so maybe a yellow filter would pull the white balance a little in the right direction making further corrections oin post processing easier and less extreme. This is a theory... I'm not certain.

It'll just make it darker, unfortunately.

[tpentax]

I agree with what has been said. Watch the WB, shoot raw and fix in post it sounds like. BW is also a alternative if it is really bad.

[kenspo]

Definitely shoot raw+. Multi-AWB helps with tricky lighting situations like these, so I'd go ahead and turn that on as well.

This..and remove the purple in PP

[UMDTERPS]

As a side note, I think you can get in trouble if you're shooting live music... don't you need a permit and make sure it's hunting season for that?

It's the Rock and Roll Hotel in Washington, D.C. who don't care if you bring in camera (Even though it says you can't on the site), plus I know some of the band members =0).

Good advice there. I would also add that modern LED lights are really terrible for colour photography. You might want to desaturate the photo and make it black and white. This will give you all the detail and nice visuals, but without the distracting, oversaturated colours.

Problem with LED is that they have a very narrow lightwave spectrum, so even if you shoot raw and change WB in post, you are more limited than you would be if you shot in full daylight or full-spectrum lights.

I take advantage of the Pentax K3 dual slots and always record both the JPEG and RAW image formats. The only thing I hate is post processing and the time it takes. I just built a new computer and for some reason its way slower than my previous machine at RAW development (I went from an Intel XEON Quad to an Intel i5 Quad). I'll play more with the RAW files tonight to see what I can get. I made one of pictures black and white and it comes out okay, but I really wanted to preserve the camera lighting. Reading about in that thread it looks to be an issue with DSLR's.

I'll set the camera to a more neutral filter setting next time to see if that makes a difference.

Here is one of the pictures I made black and white from the RAW files (See below):