Consistent Scene Illumination using a Chromatic Flash

Abstract

Flash photography is commonly used in low-light conditions to prevent noise and blurring artifacts. However, flash photography commonly leads to a mismatch between scene illumination and flash illumination, due to the bluish light that flashes emit. Not only does this change the atmosphere of the original scene illumination, it also makes it difficult to perform white balancing because of the illumination differences. Professional photographers sometimes apply colored gel filters to the flashes in order to match the color temperature. While effective, this is impractical for the casual photographer. We propose a simple but powerful method to automatically match the correlated color temperature of the auxiliary flash light with that of scene illuminations allowing for well-lit photographs while maintaining the atmosphere of the scene. Our technique consists of two main components. We first estimate the correlated color temperature of the scene, e.g., during image preview. We then adjust the color temperature of the flash to the scene's correlated color temperature, which we achieve by placing a small trichromatic LCD in front of the flash. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach with a variety of examples.