White balance questions

[subpixelsk]

Hi guys

I would like to reproduce reality as close as possible in my works but over the time I really haven´t figured out how to shoot interiors where no natural light is present.

There are two options for this - to maintain whites to be white I let main artificial lights (spotlights, ceiling light) to be pure white color, and then let accent lights (led stripes) to be warm white 3600K for example. This results in no need to touch white balance (or only a little) . However this is not very similar to how the real world works right? In real world for example in bathroom with no natural light all light sources are approximately same temperature - if this is simulated in Corona, white balance should be adjusted accordingly, but then render starts to look really weird - it gets darker and colors are not accurate.

How do you approach such cases ? Are you faking the temperatures so they fit the mood you are after? or use real world values ?

Does Corona white balance work the same way as in real world cameras?

Thanks

Thanks

[gpz]

Fake the temperature.

anyway , you have to simulate a good architecture picture not the real world.
In my opinion.

[maru]

In real world for example in bathroom with no natural light all light sources are approximately same temperature - if this is simulated in Corona, white balance should be adjusted accordingly, but then render starts to look really weird - it gets darker and colors are not accurate.

But that's also what would happen in real world, right? (e.g. if you were shooting with a digital camera)

Remember in Corona you have LightMix, so you can even add white lights to your whole scene, and then adjust them to your taste (color temperature, intensity,...).

[subpixelsk]

I think yes, time to time I just see some nice balanced photographies of tungsten interiors and am wondering how it is achieved but that is a matter of postproduction I think. But then I am no photographer I am just guessing this :)

[James Vella]

In essence in 3D if you had no environment light and simply lighting your interiors with tungsten lights at say 3200 kelvin then if you set your white balance to 3200 then your image will be calibrated to white.

In regards to photography - mainly post production, this can be easily calibrated using a color checker (like x-rite) when shooting real photography. The reason being even if you set the dial to tungsten in an internally light room it wont be perfect (usually far from it as there is many other factors such as individual cameras can see more magenta or green, the affect from the environment, lights could be different temperatures etc). Dubcat goes down the rabbit hole on this if you are interested in the details here when matching a similar profile in 3D:

https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=17712.0;all

I shoot photography with an xrite color checker so once you take the first photograph with the colour checker in atleast 20% of the camera view, you are good to shoot the rest of the shots (as long as the lighting is consistent eg. you havent moved from a bright sunny area where u calibrated into a dark internally lit room). You dont even need to set the white balance correctly after this you can just shoot away as the color checker will ensure that those colors are matched to the xrite. You also have the option then to move the white to slightly warmer or cooler based on the xrite chart but this is besides the point, you can focus on this later once you are calibrated if it interests you.