# Dealing with sodium street lights?



## rafikiphoto (Aug 12, 2014)

Our streets and plazas are well lit with yellow sodium lights. I shoot there regularly without flash at night. In post I have great difficulty editing out the strong yellow cast over the whole picture. No WB setting on my Fujifilm X series or my Leica M help. I have spent ages trying different things but I just end up with too yellow or too blue. How do others deal with this problem?


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## RikkFlohr (Aug 12, 2014)

Realize that sodium vapor lights are limited non-continuous spectrum.  They simply do not reflect or broadcast all colors of light and no amount of conventional adjustment is going to make them work.  You can't add back colors that were never there to begin with.


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## jljones (Aug 12, 2014)

Tried doing a manual white white balance? its never going to be perfect but might be better than auto.....


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## rafikiphoto (Aug 12, 2014)

jljones said:


> Tried doing a manual white white balance? its never going to be perfect but might be better than auto.....



Yes Jeremy, that is what I have been doing to date with varying levels of success. None great.


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## jljones (Aug 12, 2014)

As someone has already, these lights pretty well kill colour... You also some tones in monochrome...


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## rafikiphoto (Aug 12, 2014)

RikkFlohr said:


> Realize that sodium vapor lights are limited non-continuous spectrum.  They simply do not reflect or broadcast all colors of light and no amount of conventional adjustment is going to make them work.  You can't add back colors that were never there to begin with.



Hmmm, I see. I haven't tried fill flash yet, the light level in the plaza is always sufficient. Would flash add back some of the missing spectrum then?


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## rafikiphoto (Aug 12, 2014)

jljones said:


> As someone has already, these lights pretty well kill colour... You also some tones in monochrome...



I do get some acceptable monochrome conversions.


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## IanGains58 (Aug 15, 2014)

Yes, fill flash will help as it 'replicates' daylight lighting & doesn't have the overriding yellow content of sodium lamps.


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## brian09223 (Aug 27, 2014)

IF you have the Kelvin setting("K" on the white balance selector) I might try that and adjust. I believe those lights are considered hot, above 5000k on the Kelvin scale. What I do is start going down to 4000k, shoot one and see what it looks like. I then go down to 3000k and repeat.  From there I adjust to try and get close to "White Light" as I call it. There is also something called and Expodisk. You put in front of your lens and shoot a custom white balance.
I don't know either of those cameras or their settings so I don't know if this will help. I hope this info will be of use.


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## kbfoot (Aug 27, 2014)

If the lights are low-pressure sodium, they are truly monochromatic yellow, and there is nothing you can do except monochrome.  
If they are high-pressure sodium, a partial correction can be made at the cost of sometimes turning conventional tungsten light a mint green color.
Sounds like you have the low-pressure kind.


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