Available light with low energy bulbs and Canon digital SLRs.

Now that tungsten household bulbs are to be phased out there is a little problem for digital camera users. There is no setting for low energy bulbs. There's AWB (auto white balance) sunshine, cloud, tungsten, fluorescent tubes and so on, but nothing for the new bulbs. Picture 1 shows how AWB copes with the light from a low energy bulb.

The whites are not very white! The colour meter suggests setting 3100 Kelvin as a colour temperature if you have this facility. There's an improvement, but it's still not right:

So, leaving it at set at 3100K we go to White Balance Shift in the menu and drag the little cursor right down to the bottom left, setting B9 and M9 (I've set Blue 8 and Magenta 8 here so that the cursor is visible).

And here's the result - reasonably white whites and grey greys, and the red, green and blue don't look to bad either. This applies to Canon digital SLR cameras.

I can't vouch for other makes, but hey, have a poke about in the menu, because they'll probably have similar stuff that you can manipulate.