With the advent of Digital Cameras, the topic of white balance will pop up. White Balance is basically telling the Camera to automatically determine the light color temperature or selecting it manually. I can tell you from experience and by what people write that the correct white balance is critically important to capture the correct skin tone of your subjects.
The light's color temperature varies throughout the day and from the type of light source being used. Most flashes have a color temperature of about 5500 K. Incandescent lights have a much lower temperature of around 2800 K. Another interesting thing is that the lower the temperature is, it is called warmer and the higher the temperature is, is called cooler. Shade for example may be around 7000 K and will be bluer.
We also have a thing called color cast. This occurs when light is reflected off of a surface. We shot a wedding in a forest setting. You guessed it, their was a definite color cast from the reflected green leaves. We also shoot in houses where the walls of the room might be pink, blue, brown, etc. They are seldom white.
So how can be protect ourselves from all of these variations in color temperature? Some times we can't do much at the time of shooting and we must rely on the camera's automatic white balance setting. But there are several things that we can do to better help ourselves.
For example, we shoot in a local church that has very dark red brick walls. We know this by just looking at the color of the walls and ceiling. Before the ceremony, we will shoot what is called a grey object. That is something that is 18% grey. Our photographers always carry this grey object. That is very useful when using Lightroom and or Photoshop to correct the WB. We could also shoot a color chart and repeat the about corrections and or shoot a white card or white object.
A white object can be the bride's dress, or one of those special lens caps that you use to setup a custom white balance. If you have a white Gary Fong dome cap, that works also. You then tell the camera to use this image for your custom white balance. Grey objects are great for getting the ideal exposure in your camera and by using the White Balance tool in Photoshop you can normally improve your white balance. You can also use this WB tool and click on something white in the image.
When we shoot the formals in the church, we will be using a powerful directional fill flash from the side with a small amount of on camera fill flash. This will help but we need to refine this a bit more. Because we use Professional Cameras, we can shoot what is called a custom white balance. We focus on a white object like the bride's dress or use a white object over the lens and further tweak this by adjusting the light with a 73 setting. The 73 setting is achieved by going to the white balance shift menu and setting the A and M settings to 7 and 3, hence "73". We use this all of the time but we must remember to change this Custom setting when we move to a different location.
The above makes our life 80% easier. When we are shooting in an incandescent light setting, it is advisable to gel our flash. We have special filters that fit over all of our flash heads with will give us a 2800 K color temperature. All that is left is to set the camera to 2800 K and shoot away. That works well. When ever possible under these conditions, that is the best thing to do. The filter that we use is called Color temperature straw: CTS-Full.
An alternative to "gelling the flash" might be to lower the effect of the ambient light by using a faster shutter speed. It does how ever make sense to have all of your light that hits your subject at the same color temperature, hence gelling the flash would be the best method.
Now we need to look at our images in the proper environment. What does that mean. You know that beautiful $400 monitor you just bought? Well unless it is around 100% Adobe RGB, it just might not be the right monitor to screen your images. The standard monitor is only rated to 72% Adobe RGB. (This information was found by searching the Samsung monitor site. We currently use a Samsung and Dell monitor that have a Adobe RGB of about 100%). That is not good enough for our work. They don't tell you this information because they don't meet the specification. You are Not finished yet. Now you have to color profile your monitor. The will require a $300 calibration equipment and should be done before your process each wedding's photos. You also may need to color profile your printer to get the best results. This takes a lot of time and money again for the equipment and the time to read the results off of the calibration chart that you just printed. Can we now look at our images? Not quite. Remember that old color cast we spoke about? Well the wall in your computer office should be painted 18% grey to prevent color casts and your lights should be 5500 K also. Now you can look at your images.
So in summary, try to help your self Before you shoot. Remember to carry a grey object/white object and above all shoot it in each and every room that you shoot photos. White objects are also useful. Use a custom white balance when ever possible. The use of directional off camera flash also helps to flood the subject with white light. By doing all of the above, you may need very little color correction on the computer.
Note: We like to shoot the grey object but we also like to use a custom white balance via the lens cap combo or some alternative. Time is always important when you have over 1000 images to process. We also have software that can help to remove automatically color casts. We use the NIK filters.
I hope that this small introduction to White Balance has been useful. In addition to the above we have several Adobe Plugins and methods to help us properly correct the skin color. Digital photography is much better than film. It does however require a lot more work to produce the outstanding results that are expected by today's Professional Photographers. By knowing how to use your camera's white balance and color temperature settings, you are always carrying with you 100's of custom color filters. By creatively using the color temperature, you can create very interesting images.
Post Note: Grey and white cards, custom white balances may not always work 100% but you will be very happy to have their reference values at hand weeks after the wedding when you are tweaking some white balances. There is another way in PS to correct WB and skin tones not mentioned here. We use it when we get difficult images. You can find it in the "Skin" book. Fortunately, these methods work quiet well and are used by many photographers. We stopped shooting the custom camera calibration charts. It would take over 15min to calibrate such items.
Author:Kirk is owner of KW Masters Photography and shoots Professional Wedding and Portrait Photography in Windsor Ontario
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