Colour Cast on Canon 50D pictures

Hello to everyone here. Am a newby here. Any advise on navigating around this site will be helpful - tips etc.
Can anyone help me. I have a Canon EOS 50D camera. But am getting a colour cast on my photos - on portraits especially with or without flash - the person looks like they have a sun tan - a yellow to orange cast - looks awful.
Had it sent back for repairs twice and nothing has changed.

Am also photographing a Club Venue soon in the evening for promotional website pictures. Any tips on the colour balancing and settings in this dark venue. Will be using a tripod, good depth of field and a longer shutter speed.
Thanks
Mike

Welcome Mike, I am sure you will get all the help you need here. I have and still do. I often find colour cast has to do with camera settings rather than a fault with the actual camera itself.

Can you let me know the following: -

1. What in-camera settings do you use for saturation and tone?
2. What white-balance settings do you use?
3. Do you use a post production program like Photoshop, etc?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by LondonMikeN1

Hello to everyone here. Am a newby here. Any advise on navigating around this site will be helpful - tips etc.
Can anyone help me. I have a Canon EOS 50D camera. But am getting a colour cast on my photos - on portraits especially with or without flash - the person looks like they have a sun tan - a yellow to orange cast - looks awful.
Had it sent back for repairs twice and nothing has changed.

Am also photographing a Club Venue soon in the evening for promotional website pictures. Any tips on the colour balancing and settings in this dark venue. Will be using a tripod, good depth of field and a longer shutter speed.
Thanks
Mike

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Hi Mike and welcome. :)
I can sympathise with the colour cast issue. I bought a second hand lens a few months back. The seller said it had a UV filter with it. I used it a lot, but could never work out why my pix were so bad colourwise, particularly portraits. Turned out that the UV filter was actually a warming filter. I took this off and all was good again. Just thought you may have a warming filter on?

Hi Mike in N1,

Welcome to the CiC forums from me.

You'll see I have moved your post and two responses to the DSLR forum as I feel it will get better coverage here.

My first thought was an inappropriate WB (white balance), have you tried it on Auto?

I think if you reply with the information Peter asked for, we'll be better able to guide you rather than guessing wildly (like me).

I liked Kit's suggestion though, that sorta thing can catch anyone out; who'd have thought...

Cheers,

Hi Mike,

It's a fairly common complaint (with any camera).

First up, can you post a copy of a problem image (preferably with EXIF data intact) so we can have a look at it?

Normally auto white balance is reasonably accurate, assuming you don't have any kind of picture styles or white balance bias dialed in. Also, are you working from a calibrated and profiled monitor? Is it possibly that the captured images are correct but it's the monitor that's wrong?

The ultimate way to get accurate skintones is to shoot a reference shot with a gray card and then adjust it in post-processing.

All things we can explore with you.

With regards to the club venue -- it's hard to advise without more info. If there isn't any people / movement in the scene then it won't matter what your shutterspeed is and you'll probably be able to get away with a low ISO setting - however - lighting is often an issue (I usually light them up with at least a couple of flashes, if not some of my studio strobes) - so at a minimum, get a bracket of exposures so that you can combine these into a photorealistic HDR composite if necessary, and be sure to turn on all lights (in addition to helping with general light levels, the lights also provide a bit of interest). In terms of getting correct colour balance, this bit is relatively simple ... shoot RAW and include a gray card (or in desperation, a slightly under-exposed piece of white paper) in one of the shots.

What post-processing software do you use?

Go to a shop, and ask to try a lens out. If they are the same cast, it could be camera (not likely), software (not likely) or monitor. :)