Wedding dress blues
Most wedding dresses have anti-stain coatings that are fluorescent — meaning they glow blue when you shine UV light on them.
Unfortunately, most flashes emit UV unless you place a filter over their heads. Using the Canon EX550 flash for fill made this dress blue where the flash hit it hardest:
Some photographers have a photoshop action to look for the brightest part of the photo and turn it white. The assumption is the brightest part of the photo must be the dress.
But that wouldn’t help the blue grass near the dress, which is lit by the blue light coming off of it:
I have seen photographers place plastic warming filters over their flash heads that also cut the UV. Warming filters can be selected to match the color of indoor light so you can use fill flash in a chapel with the fill being the same color as the light inside.
Here’s our blue dress corrected, but notice it didn’t remove the blue from the grass around the dress:
Anyone have favorite filters for their flash heads?
October 27th, 2005 at 10:35 pm
The more likely cause for the blue cast is the blue sky. Col.temp. of Sun =5,600K, blue sky is filling the shadows, CT from 6000k to 20000K. Warming the flash head is warming the shadow areas on the dress. The grass is too far away to effected.
January 14th, 2006 at 4:08 pm
My favorite flash (580EX with Canon 20D) “filter” is the Light Sphere II Photo Journalist. It also is a good diffuser and bounce flash attachment. I don’t know for sure, (no wedding dress around) if that will improve the UV problem but I have not noticed it on any white that I shot.
Mel
April 3rd, 2006 at 1:02 am
its the sun causing the blue light.
the dress looks nicer without the blue color.
May 18th, 2006 at 2:32 pm
Actually, I fixed this problem by turning off the flash and using a white reflector instead. Light from the sky is actually warmer and has more yellow in it. I’ll see if I can dig up examples to post.