Paul C. Buff, Inc. Technical Forum

I just bought a Einstein a few weeks ago and I was using it last night with one of my clients and occasionally it was giving me a purple exposure. I wanted to find out if my unit wasn't working right or if this is typical.

Thank,
-Scott

What was your white balance set to? If there was no difference in exposure, then the color of the light cannot change. If you were in Auto White Balance, the camera may have seen the scene differently and compensated differently. Even small shifts in what the camera sees can greatly impact this change. Different cameras and different metering modes and focus points will impact this to differing degrees.

If you were shooting with large amounts of lime green, yellow, or orange, the AWB could have shifted to a color that could be considered purple by some.

If you shot in RAW, you should see the difference in color temperature in the RAW processing windows. If you set them to the same values, they will look the same.

I believe I my White Balance was set to Flash. I noticed this happening on 2 of my shots. We were shooting outside in a park around 6pm when the sun was behind the clouds and the lighting was low. I just want to make sure nothing is wrong with my unit since I just got it a few weeks ago.


Thank,
-Scott

Nothing immediately tells me anything is wrong. Unless a setting was changed, like power or action/color mode, the color temperature cannot change from shot to shot. If something went wrong, and the color changed, there would be a correlating power change.

Did the hue affect the entire image, only the part affected by the light, or only a part that was white fabric or paper?

If you would like, you can send a sample along with the shot just before or after (assuming it was also not affected) to info@paulcbuff.com and attention David. If you want to do this, send RAW or Large JPG images with the EXIF still intact. We will be glad to take a look at it for you.

I opened the file you sent and noticed the entire image is purple-ish, meaning the flash is not at fault, as the sky and trees in the background are also purple, and are not influenced by the flash.

Also, I noted the image color temp was like 2350K and +29 magenta. Selecting Adobe's flash preset (5500K 0M) brought the photo back to a nice color.

Not sure if the camera was set to AWB (this is my bet), or if there was some hiccup if it was set to flash white balance. I could not immediately find this in the EXIF data.