people that post, "this right from my camera, no photoshop" have one of two things going.
1. it shows, and their picture is WAY more blue than it should be.
2. It shows, and it looks like crap, or if not crap, not half as good as it could be.
People dont understand that when shooting in Jpeg the camera itself is doing all sorts of things to your photos.
Its saturating the colors, sharpening, adjusting exposure, highlights, and shadows.
When shooting in RAW, its taking exactly what the image sensor is seeing, and thats it. It doesn't do anything.
Now, when shooting in RAW you man notice that when you preview the pic it looks great, and when you pull up the raw image theres a big difference in appearance. This is because your camera will ALWAYS create a jpeg for the camera's built in preview. So it will take whatever setting you have set and apply it to those previews.
Keep in mind that has nothing to do with how your image is actually going to come out.
When shooting in RAW, your MUST process the image, just like a film purist would develop his prints in a projector, and chemicals.
The only thing that matters is you like what you see.
I can say without a doubt that shooting an image in RAW, and knowing what settings to adjust, you can make your photo look identical to what the subject looks like in your tank.
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To answer your question about white balance.
You will notice in the upper row of buttons, 3rd from the left, will be an eye dropper.
Click in it, and then in your image click on a white or gray area of the photo.
This will adjust the white balance and tint.
Many times this will be at 50,000k, and overexpose your photo. Slide it back a little ways, and it will give it a little cooler image (more blue). Adjust your exposure down a little if need be, and kick up the "black" a LITTLE.
Entering the color temp of your lights will not give you the result you desire.
then open the image.
resize your image by cropping, or by manually setting the image resolution.
THEN, hit it with a little unsharp mask, and save for web, and you are good to go.
The bottom line is, your goal is to get it to look like it does in the tank. If you can do that, great. Dont let anyone tell you that photoshop is cheating, thats just ignorance speaking.
Again, thanks everyone for the kind words....just tried my hand at snapping some pics of my clowns...wish they'd hold still like corals!
As for adjusting white balance when shooting raw. Do I pick a value that "looks good to me" or should I set it to the color of my bulbs..in this case 14k Phoenix 250DEs...
When people say "all I did was sharpen it, this is how it came out of the camera" are they just using the default value from the camera? I want great looking shots but not for people to say..."PHOTOSHOPPED!!!" Especially if post a coral for sale as WYSIWYG. I don't want to be misleading, but still want them to look great!
