Lightning colors

[Doug Raflik]

Looking at a recent lightning photo of mine, I noticed the branching of the lightning to have 2 different colors. A bluish purple, and a pinkish color. I never noticed this on any other lightning shots. Any of you lightning shooters able to explain this?

 

[Jeff Snyder]

Did you shoot that picture in RAW format or JPG? That kind of looks like a possible effect of the JPG compression and/or sharpening applied during in-camera processing (example -- the edges on the "purple" branches look like they are surrounded by particularly dark pixels, which can be a sign of slightly agressive sharpening). I'm no in-house lightning guru, so, far all I know, it may be legit. Those purple branches, however, just look a little "off".

 

[Dan Robinson]

Looks like there may be some chromatic abberation/subtle lens ghosting happening on a few of the channels that may be contributing to the coloration - most noticeable on the right-most main channel and the top-left most branch channel. Awesome shot by the way!

 

[Doug Raflik]

No sharpening was done. I shot RAW and adjusted slightly, temp, tint, and contrast, then adjusted img size to get it down to an internet friendly size, and saved it as the highest res jpg I could. This is the same lens I shoot most of my lightning with and I never noticed it before.

Doug Raflik

 

[Carey Walton]

NICE SHOT!!! I see this quite often and occurs mostly when lightning is near rain. My best guess has always been that the branches that extend further back into the rain become more reddish as the blue end of the spectrum is scattered more readily by the water droplets. The branches that stay out in front of the rain tend to be more blue.

 

[Dave Gallaher]

My best guess has always been that the branches that extend further back into the rain become more reddish.

This quote caused me to wonder if anyone has successfully captured an image from almost directly below a main channel that shows the various radii of the branches extending in different directions. I recognize that this would be a very hazardous photo to take deliberately, but has anyone inadvertently caught a close cg strike while aiming at the cloud base overhead? The oblique view of most lightning photos tends to place everything in a flat plane.

I was watching lightning colors yesterday on a storm just north of Huntsville that was making consistent pale-yellow-with-lavender strokes.