PShizzy: The Blog

Yesterday, I spoke about how important proper white balance is. A well balanced image shows very good, true colors. But how do we figure out that proper white balance? There’s a lot of ways, actually, and each method has some positives and negatives to it. Let’s take a look at the image below.

I think I did a fine job with the idea of the image: An expectant bride, recently married, is waiting for her husband. The empty chair sells me on that vibe.

But look at the white balance. It’s this sickly yellow that envelops the entire image in its tint, and to me, it’s especially noticable on the dress, and on the brides skintones.

In this post, we’ll look at different ways to get a good white balance.The first thing you can do to make sure your white balance is dead on? Shoot RAW. Shooting RAW means that white balance can be adjusted in post process without loss in image quality. Even if you get the balance wrong in camera, you can fix it in post process without loss of quality.

I shoot RAW for all weddings so I can adjust the image to get the best color balance. In this case, Adobe Camera RAW actually did a pretty good job of selecting a white balance:

I think that looks a lot better. The dress has no yellow film over it, the skin tones look pretty good, and in general I’m much happier with this image. Could it be better? Yes, but not by a lot.

But that’s why you shoot RAW. If this still doesn’t make me happy, if it’s still a touch off,I can adjust it again. And again, and again, to hearts content, until it’s perfect.

Eventually, this is the image I came up with. I adjusted the Adobe Camera Raw selection, adding a little bit more blue to offset the yellow, and bumping up the magenta to work with the skin tones a little more. I also added a little something to it to get the contrast to be punchier.

I’m glad I shot this image RAW, but I don’t shoot raw for every event. For weddings, I think proper color balance is critical, and I have no problems shooting RAW and managing the files and space that entails.

But I also shoot sports. A lot of sports. If I shot sports in RAW, I’d have piles of hard drives all over the place. Actually, I kinda do, so I can’t begin to imagine if I shot RAW all the time. So I shoot jpeg. Shooting jpeg means that the camera handles all the processing of the image. You get a file that can look good, but you need it to look good coming out of the camera, because there isn’t nearly as much latitude as there is with RAW. In fact, if you really screw up the white balance, you will probably lose a lot of image quality trying to get it to look normal.

In the camera, you have four different options for white balance: Auto, Presets, Kelvin or Custom. Auto means you let the camera figure out what the lighting is and adjust automatically. It does a good job, but it can be fooled. Just look at the first image in the post. That was auto.

Presets are generic settings for color balance. Tungsten, Flash, Daylight, Shade, Fluorescent, are all common lighting situations, but not every situation is that clear cut. What if you’re in a room with a lamp on, and a window that has daylight coming in. There’s no tungsten/daylight hybrid preset.

Kelvin is where you dial in the color temperature for the current lighting. For a lot of us, this isn’t easy. Rule of thumb: If you don’t understand where the term Kelvin comes from, just skip this.

Finally, there’s custom. Custom requires a little bit of work on your end to determine the lighting. You also need a gray card, a neutral card with no color bias. When you take a picture of it, the camera can easily look at the color from the lighting that spills onto the card. It then figures out the proper white balance to neutralize the color bias of the lighting. This is the most exact method of getting white balance, because it takes your specific lighting situation into account.

For the most part, when shooting jpeg, do your best to get an accurate white balance. If you don’t already have a gray card, get one. Start using it. If you’re in a difficult situation, where you can’t get a white balance reading off a gray card, the other options can work in a pinch. Kelvin could work, if you understand the color temperature of different light sources (like tungsten is about 2900, daylight is 5500, shade is 7000 or so).

You can also try the presets. If your lighting is obviously all tungsten lighting, then why not give that preset a shot? Out on a nice sunny day, why not go with Daylight?

And if all else fails, if nothing works, then by all means, try auto. It’s there for a reason. But you shouldn’t rely on it as your goto white balance. Just look at the first image in the post. Auto White Balance is not perfect, but armed with a better understanding of the white balance settings in your camera, and knowing that RAW can allow for that latitude, you at least now have options with which to get a better image with truer color.

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