White Balance
- Thread starter tea2085
- Start date
If you shoot RAW you can just as easily define WB in post. Yet, it's not always easy to get it right unless you have something (neutral) grey in your shot which you can use to set the correct WB. At least in LR. Else it requires some playing with the settings until it looks ok.
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Horoscope Fish
Senior Member
Quickly defined, White Balance refers to the color of ambient light as measured in degrees Kelivin. For example, daylight is 5000-6500 degrees Kelvin while candle light is much "warmer" at around 1000 degrees Kelvin. Somehwat counter-intuitively, the lower the number in degrees Kelvin the warmer the perceived color (more red) while higher the number in degrees Kelvin the "cooler" the color (more blue).
Correcting White Balance is the process of making things look right in the final photo. When the color of the ambient light is not correct, you have what is called an undesirable "color cast".
Correcting White Balance is the process of making things look right in the final photo. When the color of the ambient light is not correct, you have what is called an undesirable "color cast".
To add to the difficulty, many computer monitors have a blue cast to them. When you start to edit you can be trying to edit out blue that is not actually in the photo causing a a redness that you don't see. A tool like Spyder 4 can really help to correct this. The higher cost is a color correct monitor for editing.
The camera WB controls are pretty crude, so after we can see it is best, and which is the purpose of Raw files (to wait until you can see what it actually needs).
But it can be much better than just tweaking it until it looks better.
In many situations (esp studio situations), we can easily plan ahead a bit, and put a $5 white card in the first test shot, and use it to easily and precisely correct all our shots, one click.
And often, there is some natural white object found in our other images which (while maybe not perfect), can be extremely helpful.
You're invited to see White Balance Correction, with or without Raw
and
Why shoot Raw?
But it can be much better than just tweaking it until it looks better.
In many situations (esp studio situations), we can easily plan ahead a bit, and put a $5 white card in the first test shot, and use it to easily and precisely correct all our shots, one click.
And often, there is some natural white object found in our other images which (while maybe not perfect), can be extremely helpful.
You're invited to see White Balance Correction, with or without Raw
and
Why shoot Raw?
A white card might not be a bad idea. For any of my shots that contain human elements, I quite easily find something I can use, like windows, doors or anything else I'm familiar with and know to be white or some grey color.
For nature shots I struggle more and often pick a part of the bird I know to be reasonable close to white but it isn't a perfect method. Using a card might be better.
For nature shots I struggle more and often pick a part of the bird I know to be reasonable close to white but it isn't a perfect method. Using a card might be better.
There is no question about it.
Found substitutes can help, but a white card is absolutely perfect.And trivially easy in like a studio situation. A little more awkward for the tourist pictures of the scene on the other side of the world, surrounded by a jillion tourists.
But if standing in the same light (like an outdoor sunlight situation), we can hold the white card at arms length, in the same light. It need not be in focus.
It's a blend of two different ISO shots, one with a 30 second duration and one shorter for the stars. It's cheap trickery in post.
It's nothing really complicated Paul.
I took who shots, cam on a tripod. One at ISO 100 30 seconds to get all the environment, as wide open as possible. Then another at a faster shutter speed (to ensure the stars don't trail during ) at a high ISO. I used 10s, f/1.8 at ISO 3200. It depends on your lens what the maximum shutter is.
Then I processed those two versions. I try get maximum detail for the stars in the one, the other more towards the environment. Then I loaded them into PS, made several copies of each and started blending them together. When doing that; you can pull more stars out and play with the colors.
It's just a matter of using different blending modes and erasing the parts you don't like in a copy, merge them with the other and continue the same process until satisfied. I used quite some different blending modes but from what I remember, difference blending lead to very nice effects.
Remember that you can not blend the stars of both different shots since they moved during. Of those only the clouds and landscape can be used. For the stars you use multiple copies of the same shot.
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The problem with LR is it being single image only. You can not blend multiple shots in LR. You need another program for that. Photoshop is about best but there are more out there doing the job. There are some plugins for LR that allow you to blend but besides Perfect Layers of onOnesoft I wouldn't know others. Perfect Layers was a bit disappointing. When I tried it, it was slow as a turtle and even crashed.