I'm getting the hang of manual white balance and I haven't yet shot lightning strikes in a storm but I may this summer. What would be a safe white balance to deal with the fact that lightning is appears to make the scene/sky so blue (to my eyes)?
What is the color temperature of lightning? Sources?
Are there any good references about shooting lightning, especially regarding WB?
Will "Sunny" work (letting it come out sort of blue?), or should I go for "Flash" balance or "Shadow" balance to warm things up even more?
Does this even make sense since the goal may not be to make lightning look neutral? (any more than a blue sky could be made neutral -- rather Shadow WB makes the scene lit by the sky look more neutral)
Answer
I took some shots of lightning last night. I did not have a great vantage point, so I used the time to experiment and learn. When it came to white balance, even with AWB set on my camera, the resulting scenes came out with considerable color cast. The clouds had a deep orange hue, partly due to the orange street lights that light up suburbia where I live. The lightning bolts themselves showed up with a vibrant purple hue.
I spent some time in Lightroom trying to manually correct the color by manually setting the proper kelvin for lightning, however there is no one single correct value. After a little while I noticed a tool I had never noticed before...a dropper that lets you pick a pixel in your image that you wish to set as the 18% gray point. Using this tool, my photos instantly started looking correct. The clouds were a proper grayish tone, while the lightning bolts themselves came out to a brilliant, barely bluish, bright white.
I am not sure if other tools have a tool that lets you select an area of your image to set as the 18% gray point, however if you do, it is by far the most accurate way to properly color balance lightning shots.
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