Paul C. Buff, Inc. Technical Forum

I hope you don't mind me asking here, but haven't really had any help from photoflex (who are now owned by promark).

My large lightdome softbox from 1996 is quite yellow on the inside. It is that way across the entire inside of the lightbox, so it doesn't look like a stain, so much as just aging. It unfortunately DOES affect the color temperature of the light. In lightroom, I have to adjust the color temperature by about 1,800 degrees, so it is significant.

I had it in storage for about a decade or maybe 12 years, but it was boxed up and protected from most of the elements. Maybe the chemicals in the cardboard box in which it was stored affected the interior lining???

Otherwise, the softbox is fine. the inner and outer diffusion panels are still neutral white colors.

Has anybody ever been able to neutralize the color in a situation like this?

I am guessing that if all else fails, I could maybe use a quarter cut to a half a cut of CTB gel.

My concern then would be that since I am using the soft box with my old WL5,000 and wl10,000 strobes - and since the beam of the built in reflector is only 60 degrees - a significant amount of light would go directly through the front of the softbox (without picking up the yellow coloring from the sides of the softbox) and would thus come out significantly blue-ish if I do use the CTB gel solution.

any thoughts are greatly appreciated.

(Other option is I could probably use a 1/4 to 1/2 color temperature straw gel on the flash guns that I use in conjunction to my softbox so that they are as warm in temperature as the softbox.)

Yellowing is typically a chemical reaction that may not be reversible. However, you may try something like Woolite to see if it restores the white color.

Even if some of the light is normally unaffected by the yellow shell color, it kind of "melds" together with affected light. Given this, I don't think it is a problem to gel all of the light, just a smaller amount of correction should be used.

Thank you again for all your assistance over the years, and for this helpful suggestion. I will try woolite first, and then possibly oxiclean later.

thank you again.