Mixed lighting in wedding photos: how to edit lamps, windows and flash in one frame

What mixed lighting is

Every light source has a color, measured as a temperature in kelvin. Low numbers are warm and orange, high numbers cool and blue. Mixed lighting is any frame in which two sources far apart on that scale light different things, or the same thing from different sides.

A wedding puts these together all day. The bride gets ready by a window with the bedside lamps on. Dinner is candles and wall lights with blue dusk in the doorway. The dance floor adds your flash to a tungsten room. Between a lamp and a window lie more than 2500 K, which is the difference between an orange photo and a neutral one.

Why one white balance cannot fix mixed lighting

White balance is one pair of numbers, Temperature and Tint, applied to every pixel of the photo. It can make one light neutral. Set it for the lamps, at about 3000 K, and everything the window touches turns blue. Set it for the window, at about 6000 K, and everything the lamps touch turns orange. Set it halfway and both are wrong by half.

Your eyes did not see it that way in the room, because vision adapts to each part of a scene as you look at it. The camera records the physics. This is why mixed lighting wedding photos look worse on the screen than the room did in memory, and why the fix has two stages: one decision for the whole frame, then local corrections for whatever that decision left behind.

Two kinds of mixed light

It helps to tell two cases apart, because one of them needs no local work at all.

In the first, the sources have blended before they reach the subject. A room with lamps on and daylight filling it evenly through curtains measures about 4000 K wherever you stand. That is simply a light of an in-between color. One white balance handles it, and so does the camera profile, provided the profile was calibrated for more than one light. A dual-illuminant profile holds a tungsten and a daylight calibration and uses about half of each at 4000 K. Every NIPIK Base profile is built this way. The mechanism is explained in dual-illuminant camera profiles.

In the second, the sources stay separate. The window lights the left of the face and the lamp lights the right. The flash lights the couple and the lamps light the wall behind them. Here no single setting is correct for the whole frame, and the rest of this guide is about that case.

Decide what should stay warm

Before correcting anything, decide how much to correct. A reception rendered perfectly neutral looks like an office. Candlelight is supposed to be warm, and a couple remembers the room as golden.

A workable rule: the skin of the main subject has to be believable, and whites close to the face may stay a little warm. Everything further away can keep the color of its own light. For a room lit only by lamps, that usually means a white balance between 3000 and 3400 K in place of the fully neutral 2850 K, which leaves some of the warmth in.

What must not stay is a color split across one face, a green tint on skin from fluorescent tubes or LEDs, and a background so orange that it pulls the eye away from the people. How skin should read on the histogram is covered in skin tones in wedding photos.

This is also the idea behind Riviera - Reception, the preset for dinners and rooms lit by lamps and candles: the shadows open up and the warmth of the room stays.

What to do at the shoot

Most mixed light is easier to prevent than to edit. A few habits take seconds.

• In the getting-ready room, switch off the lamps near the window, or draw the curtains and work by the lamps alone. Either choice leaves one source.
• Turn the subject so one source lights the whole face. A lamp behind the head is a pleasant rim of warm light. A lamp on one cheek is a repair job.
• Put a warming gel on the flash in tungsten rooms. A full CTO gel brings flash down to about 3000 K, close to the lamps, so subject and room share one white balance.
• Bounce flash off white surfaces only. A cream ceiling or a wooden wall colors the light it returns.
• Use a fixed white balance setting in each room, not auto. Every frame of the scene then needs the same correction, and one fix can be copied to all of them.
• Shoot RAW. A JPEG has the white balance fixed into its pixels, and large corrections fall apart.

Editing a mixed-light frame in Lightroom, step by step

For a frame with two separate sources, work in this order.

1. Set white balance for the main subject. Click the White Balance Selector on something neutral that is lit by the same source as the face, such as a collar or the dress near the shoulders.
2. Check Tint. Under fluorescent tubes and many LEDs skin carries green, and a move toward magenta clears it.
3. Apply the preset for the room, and set exposure for the face.
4. Open Masking and select the part of the frame lit by the other source. Select Background works when the subject and the room differ. A Linear Gradient works when the second source comes from one side.
5. In that mask, move Temperature toward blue to calm a lamp-lit area, or toward yellow to warm an area lit by a window or by flash. Go about two thirds of the way to neutral and stop.
6. If the color still shouts, lower Saturation a little in the same mask.
7. Copy the settings to the other frames of the scene. Lightroom works out subject and background masks again for each photo.

Flash in a tungsten room

This is the commonest case at a reception. The flash, at about 5500 K, lights the couple. The lamps, at about 2850 K, light everything the flash does not reach. Set white balance for the couple and they are neutral, with an orange room behind them.

Often that is the photo. The warm background separates the couple from the room and says evening. When it is too much, a Select Background mask with Temperature moved toward blue brings the room back to amber. With a slow shutter the lamps also reach the people, and warm edges appear on skin and on the dress. A People mask limited to skin, slightly cooled, evens them out.

Riviera - Flash is the preset for this light, with a little more definition and with oranges and greens set for flash.

Window light with the lamps on

The getting-ready room is the other classic. Window light at 6000 K falls on the near side of the face, and a bedside lamp at 2850 K falls on the far cheek and the hair. Set for the window, the far side glows orange.

Set white balance for the window side, since it lights most of the face. Then paint a Brush mask over the warm cheek, or draw a Linear Gradient from the lamp side, and move Temperature toward blue until the two sides of the face belong to one person. Warm light that only touches the hair or the shoulders can stay as it is, where it reads as a rim light.

Where the whole frame is simply warmer than you want, with no hard split, one click of Fix - Mixed Light calms it. It is one of Riviera’s add-ons, and like most of them it arrives as its own mask, so you can lower its Amount if a frame needs less.

LEDs, fluorescents and colored party light

Tungsten and daylight both contain the whole spectrum, in different proportions. Fluorescent tubes and many LEDs do not: their light has gaps and peaks. Temperature alone will not make them neutral, and the leftover shows as green or magenta. Correct it with Tint for the frame, and with Tint in a mask where only part of the frame is affected.

Colored party lights are a different matter. A face lit only by a deep magenta or blue beam holds almost no information in the other colors, and white balance has nothing to restore. There are three sound options: accept the color as part of the party, convert the frame to black and white, or use flash at the moment of exposure so that white light reaches the faces.

Riviera - B&W is there for the frames where color cannot be rescued and the moment is too good to lose.

Where NIPIK helps in mixed light

NIPIK works on this problem at three levels. At the bottom, every NIPIK Base camera profile is dual-illuminant: calibrated for daylight and for tungsten, with Lightroom blending between the two as white balance moves. Whatever white balance you choose for the skin, the colors that follow from it are rendered with the calibration for that light. Measured across all 741 cameras, skin lands about 31% and foliage about 38% closer to the true chart colors than with Adobe Standard, and the greens stay closer under tungsten as well.

Above the profile, Riviera, by Danilo & Sharon, has a preset for each kind of evening light: Riviera - Reception for rooms lit by lamps and candles, Riviera - Flash for the dance floor, and Riviera - B&W.

On top come the add-ons for single frames: Fix - Tungsten Light cools warm tungsten light, Fix - Mixed Light calms warm mixed light, Fix - Orange Skin calms orange skin, and Fix - Green Cast on People takes green light off people. Each is one click, and each can be turned down by itself. How the parts stack is described in modular Lightroom presets.

White balance stays yours to set, frame by frame, as it has to in mixed light. Riviera works in Lightroom Classic version 14.4 or newer and in Camera Raw in Photoshop, on Mac and Windows.