Hello! First I want to congratulate @aurorajane for her winning Lightpainting in the previous contest! WOW! Well done!
I also want to thank her for asking me to host. I will do my best.
Second, thank you for helping me select a topic. I hope you join in and learn something new.
This week’s Challenge will be White Balance, which is super important in photos. I learned about it two years ago when we moved into a house with awesome natural light, with hardwood floors. I couldn’t figure out why all my photos looked yellow.
What is White Balance? “White balance (WB) is the process of removing unrealistic color casts, so that objects which appear white in person are rendered white in your photo”
More from this article: http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/white-balance.htm
There are different ways to set the white balance:
1. Cameras have preset settings according to lighting conditions. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/digitalcameras/understanding-white-balance-settings-on-a-digital-camera/2499
2. You can use a true white or gray card and set it manually in your camera according to the lighting conditions. (You will have to google your camera and how to for specifics or see your manual). http://digital-photography-school.com/introduction-to-white-balance
3. You can photograph a white or gray card in the lighting conditions, remove the card and take the photographs you want. You will then have a true white to correct in post processing. This works well for the RAW shooters, but you can also do it in jpeg format too. http://bermangraphics.com/digital-jury-resources/black-white-color.htm
The Challenge: You take photographs paying close attention to white balance. I will be looking for clarity in colors in your photos. Which method should you use? Whichever one is the best fit for your camera, style and equipment available. You know where you want your photography to go.
Tag your entries CSC-9. I will accept entries until Saturday, July 28, 2012 at 8pm CST. (I know you just voted for two weekends, but I am leaving on a road trip July 29th at 5am. When I agreed to this, it was before the vote. Thanks for compromising.)
We will vote until July 31st and the winner will be announced shortly after. I will do my best on the road.
Feel free to leave any questions in this discussion or on any of my photos and I will do my best to get back to you in a timely manner.
More on this Challenge:
http://365project.org/myhrhelper/365/2011-12-12
http://365project.org/discuss/themes-competitions/13527/winner-csc-8#comment-404447
Another article on White Balance:
It’s sarcastic, but informative: http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/whitebalance.htm
Oh dear. Love to participate but I almost never use the correct white balance! It's the first or second thing I adjusted to be off when I return to my Mac.
@la_photographic Yes, if you use the camera's best guess settings. Those are based on the typical temperatures of those lights, so I find they are not correct and I still correct them in post processing. But they are closer than automatic settings, so they are good to practice.
@viranod I am SOOO guilty of correcting it later and in night shooting, the wrong white balance makes fun effects. Breaking the rules can be so much fun!
Wow, exciting! I kind of have experimented with WB but never really figured out how to 'really' do it. I usually adjust it in post-processing, like @viranod. Challenge ahead! YAY. Thanks so much for hosting this!!!
@cfitzgerald Excellent, thank you Courtney. I am looking forward to learning about white balance!! Actually, the vote was for 10 days that people can participate and you selected 10 days! :)
I just had an "ah ha" moment. I knew about the white balance presets but I didn't know I can custom set these and always wondered why so few options! Oh Courtney this is great! I am so glad you picked this topic.
EVERYONE SUBMITTING PHOTO'S
Be sure to copy the code from your photo's and paste them in this thread for construction feedback from either Courtney or other experienced photographers regarding the challenge.
If I enter the first thing I have to do is re-calibrate my monitor, and have to make sure all voters have calibrated their monitors correctly too :-) .. just joking!
@viranod you might be joking but I'm glad you pointed that out... I was wondering why on my monitor the incorrect versions above look natural and "correct" and the correct versions look overexposed and unnatural. I'll have to look at this again when I get home and see if it still appears that way.
It is interesting because I added a color cast on the incorrect versions, otherwise everything is the same. I will check my settings and calibrate when I get a chance. @jsw0109
@cfitzgerald@jsw0109@traeumerlein For the office I bought a Spyder3 and every now and then I take him home to recalibrate the monitor. Both with natural light and artificial light (evening). You can select in your Winows settings the one you need at a specific moment. See http://spyder.datacolor.com/products/
@cfitzgerald Nice theme! I would like to make two remarks if I may:
- whitebalance is personal. I prefer a bit warmer colors. Even in your two photos of the girls I think I would chose the first one and ad some contrast. In wedding shoots with poor weather conditions I increase color warmth in Lightroom to get a less cold idea. Anyhow I only shoot in RAW, so you don't need to chose the white balance in the camera, but in the processing.
- whitebalance depends on the situation. Let's say you have a christmas dinner with candlelight. When you set the whitebalance on the white table cloth (whether in the camera or in Lightroom etc), you get very cold, clean photos and not the warm atmosphere the candles should bring.
Similar to the Christmas dinner, when you get lights coming from sources with different color temperature, especially night street shots and sunset/sunrise with lights from the sky, street lampposts, car trails, and houses' windows, which is the correct white balance? IMO white balance is judgmental except for studio setup, simple portraits and daytime outside football games in the sun, etc.
Yes, I agree, WB is personal and I shoot RAW and process in LR.
I would have loved to have taught light trails, wide aperture, ANYTHING other than something that everyone seems to have an opinion about, but since I asked the students, this is what they wanted to learn. (And those other topics seem to have been done.)
"Similar to the Christmas dinner, when you get lights coming from sources with different color temperature, especially night street shots and sunset/sunrise with lights from the sky, street lampposts, car trails, and houses' windows, which is the correct white balance? IMO white balance is judgmental except for studio setup, simple portraits and daytime outside football games in the sun, etc."
@viranod Well said, this is why I was hesitant to do WB, but the other suggestion was exposure and I think we'd have a similar problem. I offered resources on WB for those who wanted to learn it.
As far as picking finalists, I have no idea. I was going to figure it out at a later date. I take each day as it comes. once I saw people's examples, I was hoping to figure it out.
@cfitzgerald Courtney, I am so sorry, I think you must have misunderstood me. I am here to learn and I think it is a great idea and I think they are great examples! I didn't mean to upset you or criticise your style. I was just wondering how to calibrate a screen because I'm curious. And I'm sure that neither of the other two wanted to upset our criticise you either. Jaap has hosted this challenge before and he surely only wanted to be helpful.
@traeumerlein No, I will not leave and I didn't mean to sound defensive either. I do understand your question too. I know when we are here, and show our work, we put ourselves out there for critique, but I wasn't really asking for it (I know you didn't offer it.) :)
Yes, screen calibration is very important and I don't know how to make us all see the same, we can't.
I am very frustrated with my photography and equipment (which is no one's problem but mine) right now and very sensitive about my photos. I have so much knowledge but all of my cheap gear is wearing out and I have to sit patiently until it can slowly be replaced. It is not all about the gear, but it is, when it doesn't work correctly.
So anyway, sorry to get defensive, I didn't mean to. I just want to help educate others and give you easy to read resources. I know where to go for quick reads and I have spent YEARS finding them.
@cfitzgerald I'm glad to hear that! And I'm sorry to hear about your equipment - I can truly understand your frustration but I love your work and I'm sure it will be fine :)
Thanks for hosting this challenge again and thank you so much for the link for mac (as I happen to use one) :)
Gee - I can feel my body wanting to throw itself into convulsions!!! This is very unfamiliar territory. I understanding how light differentiates, but have never selected white balance settings in the camera... I'm a bit lazy.... good old 'auto white balance' has been one of those close but silent friends of mine. Well, nothing quite like a steep learning curve.... so here I come!
@mikehamm Good question.... I don't know... Note it I guess.... WHY NOT? The point is to learn how to use it to better your photography and breaking the rules definitely betters the photography so if you do that, say it on the photo and I have no problems with it.
If you look in my project, you will see a couple of pics where I've played with WB and I think I have a pretty good handle on it from a correct color standpoint so that's why I'm asking if it's ok to break the rule in this case.
Ok, I'm taking a chance. I've posted my purposely broken the rule WB picture. Taken in broad daylight. Was going for something that looked like at night under moonlight. Used a flourescent setting for this.
Since our goal is to learn more about our cameras and their settings I don't see any problem with "breaking the rules". But it would be helpful to everyone if you posted with your photos what white balance, or temperture, you used and why.
I agree that calibrating your screen is important but even if everyone on this website calibrated their screens we still would not see the same colors because every one sees color differently.
Courtney, when it comes time to pick the finalist just pick the photos that "speak" to you or pick the most improved. In the end everybody is a winner because we are all learning how to better use our cameras and be better photographers.
For anyone that wants to manually set color:
1500K - Candlelight
2680K - 40W Incandescent bulb
3000K - 200W Incandescent bulb
3200K - Sunrise/Sunset
3400K - Tungsten bulb
3400K - 1 hour from Sunrise/Sunset (blue hour)
4500-5000K - Xenon bulb
5500K - Sunny daylight at noon
5500-5600K - Photo Flash
6500-7500K - Overcast
7500-9000K - Shade (from light to heavy)
9500-15000K - Blue Sky
These temperatures are pretty standard but you will see slight variations at different websites. Also if you are using specialty light bulbs (i.e. daylight ) the temperatures will vary.
Here is a set of photos from tonight to show differences in White Balance. Straight out of the camera.
1. Auto. This is not far off from what the sky actually looked like. It should have been a little "bluer". Since it was auto I can't tell what temp was used.
2. Incandescent. The setting on my Nikon is 3000K.
This is a little too "blue.
3. Fluorescent. On fluorescent my Nikon allows me to choose from 2700-7200. This setting is "sodium vapor" at 2700K.
4. Manually set temperature to 10,000K (Blue Sky). I think the sun exploded in this one.
So you can see, like in Mike's photo, how White Balance can be used to either improve your natural photo or create art.
@cfitzgerald - Courtney, yes just a wb setting for this. Although, it was also exposed about -2/3. So, there is that bit of underexposure. But I tend to use that underexposure setting, normally, when shooting lots of green.
I could be totally off base, but I think originally these challenges were for those of us who are a little more on the beginner side to work on getting to know our cameras better.
I'm thinking about all the times my people looked like smurfs or like they had liver disease.
Since it isn't part of the exif info, maybe we should try to add comentary about what we chose and why.
Courtney I appreciate your hosting, and I for one look at these more for the learning than winning. So whatever looks good to the judge is what wins. Choose what looks good to you.
Everything about photography is subjective.
@cfitzgerald@tigerdreamer This is a very good challenge and difficult one for Courtney. It can be divided into 2 challenges that runs in parallel - 1 make the white balance as real as possible, and 2 use white balance to make the photos the way you like! :-)
@cfitzgerald@traeumerlein It indeed has never been my attention to 'attack' you! Just to give two complements. And I know by experience that you always will have comments, so I don't think it depends on the subject. So, it was just to help everyone. It's important for everyone first to follow your lessons to better learn the camera, and that's what it all is about. And thereafter think about the exceptions I mention.
I agree with @viranod about the way someone can do the challenge: first get the most realistic whitebalance and as a second the most beautiful in your opinion. Enjoy, with perfect or less perfect cameras!
@lstasel This is a good exemple of how different you can grab the same moment! And except if you are a photo journalist, just select the one you think is the most beautiful. I just see you didn't tag your photos yet.
@cfitzgerald Thanks for this - I tend to change the WB in camera when using manual although when I use other camera settings you can only use Auto White Balance. How do you amend it in Photoshop? Are you meant to maybe use different white balance settings to show the difference? Thank You for being patient with me.
I am not familiar with either form of Photoshop, I use Lightrooms 3 and 4, with Aperture too. I hope these help answer your questions.
I do know that when you shoot in any of the Automatic modes, the camera is in control of the settings, so you have to make adjustments and corrections in post processing, which is a good reason why so many want to learn the manual settings. (Brains with knowledge and practice work better than electronic guesses most of the time :-) ).
Does your camera have semi-automatic settings, like an Aperture priority mode, or Shutterpriority mode? I know in my canon, I have control over the white balance in those modes.
I hope I answered your question and didn't ramble too much! Ask more!
@cfitzgerald I use CS5 and will try the links out at the weekend. Are you meant to use different white balances to make the image more arty looking or the correct one for the lighting?
@la_photographic When the community asked for a white balance challenge I assumed it was to learn how to set the white balance to white. But others have asked to break the rules. I think the point is to use white balance to make the photo better.
@cfitzgerald Cool. This is a great work you are doing. Looking forward to seeing them. Today, I already turned my wall very very warm so it can't be used :-)
Here are some of today's shots. I uploaded them all together as one shot to save space ond to keep my wall cleaner for everyone that is not doing the challenge.
This hosta is under a couple of very large trees and the sky is overcast.
1. Auto White Balance in the camera. Not bad color but the hosta is not white.
2. Whibal (grey card). I took a photo of my grey card next to the hosta. Using the NEF file (RAW) I adjusted the white balance of the grey card in camera raw. After doing that I opened the NEF file for the hosta photo shot in Auto and adjusted the white balance to match the grey card. The temperature that it balanced to was 5300K. That is not cloudy or shade so what my eyes were telling me was not correct because this photo is the closest to the correct color.
3. Cloudy White Balance in camera. The white balance in this photo is a little "creamy" too much yellow but not all that bad.
Overall, because of the subject matter, the white balance on any of these would work but the grey card produced the closest match to color.
@lstasel Wow Laura I hope I can sound as knowledgeable as you do on this by the time I'm done with the challenge. I'm still trying to figure out how you even adjust the white balance in my camera. I finally found out that you can adjust the various settings direct sun, cloudy etc. by moving the location on the color grid. I want to figure out how to use a grey or white card which I don't own. I'm thinking that if I use white that would be truer than some grey I will find.
Also Laura, I love your examples and explanation of what you did!
Here is today's final shot. I took 3 photos: Auto, Cloudy and a shot of my grey card. I used the NEF (RAW) shot, Cloudy White Balance because it had the least blown hightlights. Processing the grey card shot gave me a setting of 5200K with a tint setting of +1. My camera (Nikon D300) does not process bright yellow well so to overcome the last of the blown highlights I adjusted both the black point and brightness.
Since those two adjustments darkened the photo I did a slight curves adjustment, noise reducion for the background and some sharpening.
@myhrhelper Thanks Kathy. You can change your White Balance in the Shooting Menu on your camera. It is about the 4th item down below picture size and quality. I couldn't tell from the photos on Nikons webpage if you can do it from one of the dials on top of the camera. The manual was no help. Nothing on white balance at all.
The problem with using white is that white is not standard either. It can have blue, yellow or pink undertones. Of course I know people who have metered the palm of their hand and adjusted it in camera raw to set white balance. Actually I did it myself one day to see if it would work. It did. A little more work to adjust than setting white balance.
@myhrhelper - Kathy, you want to use a gray card to set your custom white balance. Camera sensors are calibrated to that 18% gray card so it is the perfect thing to use for custom white balance. As Laura @lstasel mentions, you can do it with white but it's way trickier. A proper gray card works best.
Another submission. This time with correct WB. My camera (D300) allows me to not only set custom white balance for certain conditions, but then also save 4 of them in-camera and as many as I'd like on a memory card. Then I can just recall the one I want for the condition. I use this one, a lot, in my kitchen. I have daylight balanced flourescent lamps overhead, a skylight that lets in diffuse natural light plus the back door is usually open and the light from it is generally shaded. So, 3 different light types. I always take the pic in the same place in the kitchen so I set a custom white balance using my gray card for this location. Seems to be working out very well so far.
Note that I did set a black control point and darken midtones just slightly. Those are more for exposure than balance, though.
Tonight's dinner ingredients. Will be served with some sort of pasta.
Here is an example of mixing different lights and how the white balance can look OK on a part of the image while on the other part it looks completely off.
It will pay to click on the image and read the description as it goes into a bit more detail.
I'm learning a lot from this challenge. Last night I was at a minor league baseball game. The sky was very cloudy, just about completely overcast. If I hadn't learned about setting the white balance myself from the links Courtney posted, I would have ended up with a card full of images I would have had to have spent hours adjusting in Photoshop.
Today I'm going to the Cincinnati Museum Center to see the A Day in Pompeii exhibit. This will entail indoor shooting with no flash and museum lighting. I'll decide what pic from yesterday or today I'm going to post tonight after I get home.
In this photo, The white balance of the guy is corrected (as seen in my MacbookPro 17inch LCD monitor). While the white-balance of the guy smoking is corrected, white-balance of the street behind him, and the part of sky-train above him is still too cold! can't have both.
@tigerdreamer I'm going to find my white balance settings and try out new things with it. I will tag it but winning for me will be understanding how it works. :)
If you shoot in RAW, you can correct white-balance in post-processing in your raw converter (e.g. Lighroom, or Photoshop's Adobe Camera Raw plugin) without loss of data. The corrections you apply here result in exactly the same image as if you'd chosen the setting in the camera at the time you took the photograph.
When shooting in JPEG, you can do white balance correction, but you will be more limited in the amount you can alter it without significant image degradation. It's better to try and get the white balance at least close using the camera settings, if you don't use RAW.
Even if you do use RAW, using a gray card will still allow you to get a perfect white balance, which can save a lot of time compared to having to guess at what looks about right in post-processing.
Regarding @viranod's comment about not being able to have two settings, this is one of the reasons I like shooting in RAW (and hence having the ability to adjust after the fact). The problem seen in his shot is common, where you have two light sources of very different colour temperature. I had a similar problem with this shot I took a couple of weeks ago, as seen here straight out of camera:
I really wanted to give the light from the foreground buildings a nice warm, rich feel, while at the same time giving the sky and tower a deep, midnight blue colour, as you see at dusk. However, the foreground lighting was gas discharge and quite cold in colour. As you can see, in the shot above, the camera has picked a middle ground -- the building light is slightly greeny-blue, and the sky has gone slightly purple.
I could cool down the white balance and bring the sky to how it should be, but this made the buildings look awful, or I could warm up the white balance and make the buildings look nice, but the sky would go a crazy colour.
What I was able to do, as it was RAW, was do both. I processed the image with a warm white balance, making the building light nice and warm, and then processed it again with a cool white balance, making the sky look how I wanted it to. Blending the two photos together was relatively easy here, as I had a nice hard line between the building and the sky, but even in @viranod's shot it could be done.
The end result, for my photo:
Personally this was exactly the look I was picturing in my mind when I took the shot. (Cue everyone saying how they prefer the out-of-camera shot... ;) )
Just an example that in the digital age, you can sometimes have your cake and eat it. You'll find a lot of pros do this frequently, as in these days of incandescents, halogens, gas-discharge, LEDs and CFLs, it's very common to get a photo where you have two incompatible colour temperatures to deal with.
I found out yesterday that the zoo was going to stay open for the evening today so I decided to go and play around with white balance. I was suprised to find that even inside most of the houses the correct white balance turned out to be "daylight". That is because most of the interior exhibits are lit by skylights and windows.
I shot this photo both as "shade" and "daylight". He was in the shade, the sun was setting behind the trees. The "daylight" exposure was actually closer to being correct, I believe that is because while he was in the shade my camera was pointed toward the setting sun, even though it was behind the trees.
There were a lot of challenges to getting this shot. First being the fact that he is behind a chain link fence. Focusing was pretty difficult but the sun being so low in the sky helped. I lucked out that he sat still for a couple of shots for me.
The "daylight" setting metered at 5000K. I corrected it to 5500K and made adjustment to both the white and black points. I did have to crop out a section to the left and above his head where the fence showed. I did a minor curves adjustment and noise reduction and some sharpening.
I did not use a grey card today because my 70-200 has a minimum focus of about 5' and it was not practical. This is the second time I have gotten these white balance results at the zoo so the next time I might try setting white balance manually to around 5600K and doing some test shots.
I chose to take my photographs indoors, specifically at the "A Day in Pompeii" exhibit at the Cincinnati Museum Center as I've always had problems with "museum lighting".
I know that the museum curators limited the lighting in the exhibition in order to protect the archaeological artifacts and to create a mood. However, this means that visitors don't get to see the true colours of the objects on display. Most of the time, everything appears with golden or orange cast as in this picture of an alabaster funerary urn:
My Canon 30D was set to the "auto white balance" setting. It looks pretty but striated alabaster should have shades of grey and green along with the white and cream colours. Also the dark grey fabric of the display base looks more brown than grey.
After taking a test shot of my 18% grey card, I used the "custom white balance" setting to get this picture:
The colours are now rendered as if the urn was being viewed under full sunlight; the grey and green tones of some of the striations are now apparent. This is a much more accurate rendering of the artifact. You can see that the display base is now grey instead of brown.
Lastly, and just for fun, I changed the 30D to the "color temperature" or "K" setting and clicked through four different temperatures. I put these four pictures together with the two pictures above and made this collage:
This was a fun and educational challenge. And I finally learned how to use the "custom WB" control on my camera!
Just one thing that might be worth mentioning reading your write-up (and great leopard shot): you mention that you didn't use a grey card because of the long minimum focus distance of your lens. Just so that people are aware, it's not actually necessary for your grey card to be in focus, it only needs to be in the frame. Indeed, if your grey card is in less-than-perfect condition (marked or creased), being out of focus can actually help!
Depending on your camera and focus settings, you may need to temporarily switch to manual focus on the lens to get the camera to take the out-of-focus shot of your grey card, but after that, the process is identical (just make sure to remember to switch it back to auto-focus!)
Finally, as it doesn't seem to have been mentioned here yet, many photographers use an ExpoDisc for taking their white balance shot. This is a diffusing filter that screws onto the front of your lens like any other filter, and effectively averages the colour balance of the entire scene as the lens is seeing it. They are used very similarly to a grey card -- you screw the filter on, take a photo (again, you might have to use manual focus, as the camera cannot focus with the filter on), and use the photo to set the white balance for the scene.
They are an expensive option, and I don't use one personally, but a lot of photographers swear by them, especially wedding photographers who move between different light sources frequently throughout the course of a day. If anyone is serious about getting their white balance absolutely correct in camera, you may wish to investigate further.
@lstasel - Laura, I don't know what editing software you are using, but most of them will also allow you to select a gray area of an image to use as your neutral (gray) point to help with that white balance too.
I use Capture NX2 and it's as easy as selecting the neutral point tool and then clicking on a gray area of the image with the tool. Sometimes I select the "wrong" gray area, but I just undo it and try another area. I believe there is similar functionality in Photoshop.
Your leopard image has lots of gray areas to sample with that tool.
I took way to many picures and ended up losing track of what settings I used. This one turned out the best, but I think it might still be a little to blue. I tried to get more red in, but then the darker fur was really red. I hope to try a few more before this challenge ends.
To get this shot I was handholding my 70-200mm f/2.8 leaning over a short fence to get close enough to the chain link to focus past it. I should have put the camera on the tripod, taken the white balance shot and then tried for the real shot but I wanted to get at least a couple of shots before anyone else came up to the enclosure. He does not like children, especially if they are noisy and also I really don't want any kids seeing me leaning over the fence and thinking it is okay to go past the fence. I got maybe 4 shots before someone came up with kids and that was the end of any photographs.
Mike, I use Camera Raw in Photoshop and it does have a white balance tool which usually works really well. When I used it on this photo all of the "grey" points on the left half of the photo pushed to far to the "blue" spectrum and the right half of the photo pushed too far to the "red" spectrum. I could have kept trying to get the right "grey" but I knew that my original white balance was just barely off so just took the easy way out.
If you look up near his head, the area that is reddish is the chain link fence where I didn't completely focus past it. There is another section on the right side down near his feet. And I cropped the photo on the upper left corner where the fence was the worst.
I took this shot at about 1:00 p.m. under a tree. The sun was almost overhead and the lighting was dappled shade so I decided to set White Balance to "Sunny". I took at shot of my grey card and then a couple shots of the mushroom.
My Nikon meters the "sunny" White Balance at 5000K. Processing the grey card told me the correct White Balance should be 5400K with a tint of +11.
I think the next time I shoot "daylight" I will manually set White Balance to 5500, which is what the White Balance Charts say, and see how close I come to getting it perfect in the camera.
I was hoping for some full sun today so I could try manual white balance. I got overcast, sunny, overcast, sunny so I shot "sunny", "cloudy" and manual 5650K (which is supposed to be "sun at noon"). I also used a grey card.
Processing the grey card gave me 5250K with a tint of -3.
Right off the bat I could tell the "cloudy" exposure was the furthest off.
The "sunny" exposure was a little blue looking but didn't look too bad.
What surprised me was that my manual setting of 5650K looked almost perfect on the monitor (since my grey card told me I needed a white balance of 5250K). So I opened it to process and photoshop said that it was 5300K, not the 5650K that I set in the camera. So in the end it was almost perfect. I set the exposure to +.2 and lowered the brightness to +25 (down from +50) and lowered the black to 0 (down from 5) I lowered the brightness and black because I would rather make that adjustment as a "curves" adjustment in photoshop. Like usual, a little bit of noise reduction and sharpening.
So my lesson for today is that my camera doesn't appear to meter exactly to Kelvin. It also explains why my "sunny" white balance meters 5000K when according to my manual it should meter 5200K. I will have to do some more testing to see if it is consistently off by 200-400K.
Another shot using white balance. I tried putting several pictures to compare together, but couldn't get my editing program to cooperate. So this is it. I do not appear to be able to set by temperature. This is using the shade setting (which it was taken in shade). The direct sunlight came out blue and the auto and cloudy shots were to yellow. I do have a setting to take a photo of a grey or white card, but don't have either (now that my husband knows, it might be a birthday present in the future).
So I thought I would give this a try. I ordered a gray card but I don't know if I'll get it on time. This will probably not be my only shot, this was more of a pure experiment shot.
I used a sheet of white copy paper to set my manual white balance setting that shot is on the left. Next is the auto white balance and incandescent on the right.
I'm going to get more white balance practice in August if my doc gives me the go head to go scuba diving when I go to Florida at he end of the month. I've finally got a plastic 18% grey card that I can take underwater with my photo rig and strobe. It will be interesting to see what difference using the custom white balance makes in my underwater pictures. My teacher, underwater photographer David Haas, suggested that I only use the custom WB for non-strobe wide angle shots and use autobalance WB for close-up/macro shots with the strobe.
This was a great challenge. I've definitely gotten more comfortable using the white balance controls and am more confident that my photos will turn out the way I think they should.
@cfitzgerald Ahhh, you have created a monster! I now see the shots a bit more in relation to white balance. I took a shot today that on any other day I would have been somewhat pleased with, but then I looked at it compared to the building and it is much more yellow. Oh perhaps it is better just to be blissfully ignorant lol?? In all honesty I love learning and this has been another eye opener! Yes, this may not have been the more glamours fun setting to teach but I'm so glad you went with your teacher side of giving what the students want.
@myhrhelper Ah, yes! Once you see it, you can't deny it! I have had fun with this too. Making myself do it in camera instead of fixing it in post processing. It does save time later and is a good reminder to take the extra 30 seconds when setting up my equipment! I look forward to picking finalists (not really that is so hard!) and having the community vote!
It has been fun to watch people post their experiments and trials with this challenge. :)
Question - when you get a gray card set it comes with the black and a white card too. When do you use those? Do they all do the same thing or do you use them under different conditions?
@myhrhelper My understanding is that the white and gray card can be used interchangeably (I have normally do). White is brighter, and gray is more subdued.
Black is use more for shooting at night, for the Black Card method, which is tricky. I have never played with that. My understanding of that is it is used most often for sunsets and sunrises when the light is very dim.
What great timing that your cards came today! Yay!
My understanding of the black and white cards is they are used to set the black setpoint and white setpoint in an image. You *can* use the white card for custom white balance, but it's recommended to use the gray for that since that is how the camera's sensor is calibrated.
How are you liking the results of using the gray card? Also, which brand/model(?) of gray card set did you purchase?
This is an interesting challenge, I learned more about my camera WB settings. Although I use them when shooting, I knew nothing about the PRE setting on the Nikon. (same as K on Canon) Anyway I fooled around with it and will need to get one of those cards. This was a set up that was unusual because of the lighting from the window and incandescent also. Shot it incandescent and had to bump the exposure up in PP.
@mikehamm Hi Mike, I have the DGK Color Tools. Is that a good/bad brand & does it make a difference? The cards are a little larger which I liked as well.
I like using the gray card - I can see how in some settings even more than others it will make a huge difference. I didn't see extreme difference for the flowers above - without in cloudy the colors were deeper. I realize that may be a desired effect but it's good to decide to change it in post processing rather than have it already determined for you.
@myhrhelper - Oh, I was just curious as to which one you got. No idea if one brand is better than another. I purchased a different brand, but it was the one our instructor recommended.
Tweets ahoy!
Join the Group
Pin With Me
White Balance: http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/white-balance.htm http://www.zdnet.com/blog/digitalcameras/understanding-white-balance-settings-on-a-digital-camera/2499 http://digital-photography-school.com/introduction-to-white-balance http://bermangraphics.com/digital-jury-resources/black-white-color.htm http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/whitebalance.htm
Challenge links: http://365project.org/myhrhelper/365/2011-12-12 http://365project.org/discuss/themes-competitions/13527/winner-csc-8#comment-404447
Thanks.
I just had an "ah ha" moment. I knew about the white balance presets but I didn't know I can custom set these and always wondered why so few options! Oh Courtney this is great! I am so glad you picked this topic.
EVERYONE SUBMITTING PHOTO'S
Be sure to copy the code from your photo's and paste them in this thread for construction feedback from either Courtney or other experienced photographers regarding the challenge.
SPIDER
@cfitzgerald Nice theme! I would like to make two remarks if I may:
- whitebalance is personal. I prefer a bit warmer colors. Even in your two photos of the girls I think I would chose the first one and ad some contrast. In wedding shoots with poor weather conditions I increase color warmth in Lightroom to get a less cold idea. Anyhow I only shoot in RAW, so you don't need to chose the white balance in the camera, but in the processing.
- whitebalance depends on the situation. Let's say you have a christmas dinner with candlelight. When you set the whitebalance on the white table cloth (whether in the camera or in Lightroom etc), you get very cold, clean photos and not the warm atmosphere the candles should bring.
Similar to the Christmas dinner, when you get lights coming from sources with different color temperature, especially night street shots and sunset/sunrise with lights from the sky, street lampposts, car trails, and houses' windows, which is the correct white balance? IMO white balance is judgmental except for studio setup, simple portraits and daytime outside football games in the sun, etc.
Yes, I agree, WB is personal and I shoot RAW and process in LR.
I would have loved to have taught light trails, wide aperture, ANYTHING other than something that everyone seems to have an opinion about, but since I asked the students, this is what they wanted to learn. (And those other topics seem to have been done.)
"Similar to the Christmas dinner, when you get lights coming from sources with different color temperature, especially night street shots and sunset/sunrise with lights from the sky, street lampposts, car trails, and houses' windows, which is the correct white balance? IMO white balance is judgmental except for studio setup, simple portraits and daytime outside football games in the sun, etc."
@viranod Well said, this is why I was hesitant to do WB, but the other suggestion was exposure and I think we'd have a similar problem. I offered resources on WB for those who wanted to learn it.
As far as picking finalists, I have no idea. I was going to figure it out at a later date. I take each day as it comes. once I saw people's examples, I was hoping to figure it out.
Please don't leave this challenge!
If you use a mac you can calibrate your own screen according to your eyes, but spider is better because it's a true color calibration. http://www.macworld.com/article/1045798/augustdigitalphoto.html
Yes, screen calibration is very important and I don't know how to make us all see the same, we can't.
I am very frustrated with my photography and equipment (which is no one's problem but mine) right now and very sensitive about my photos. I have so much knowledge but all of my cheap gear is wearing out and I have to sit patiently until it can slowly be replaced. It is not all about the gear, but it is, when it doesn't work correctly.
So anyway, sorry to get defensive, I didn't mean to. I just want to help educate others and give you easy to read resources. I know where to go for quick reads and I have spent YEARS finding them.
Thanks for hosting this challenge again and thank you so much for the link for mac (as I happen to use one) :)
Community, what do you think???
Since our goal is to learn more about our cameras and their settings I don't see any problem with "breaking the rules". But it would be helpful to everyone if you posted with your photos what white balance, or temperture, you used and why.
I agree that calibrating your screen is important but even if everyone on this website calibrated their screens we still would not see the same colors because every one sees color differently.
Courtney, when it comes time to pick the finalist just pick the photos that "speak" to you or pick the most improved. In the end everybody is a winner because we are all learning how to better use our cameras and be better photographers.
For anyone that wants to manually set color:
1500K - Candlelight
2680K - 40W Incandescent bulb
3000K - 200W Incandescent bulb
3200K - Sunrise/Sunset
3400K - Tungsten bulb
3400K - 1 hour from Sunrise/Sunset (blue hour)
4500-5000K - Xenon bulb
5500K - Sunny daylight at noon
5500-5600K - Photo Flash
6500-7500K - Overcast
7500-9000K - Shade (from light to heavy)
9500-15000K - Blue Sky
These temperatures are pretty standard but you will see slight variations at different websites. Also if you are using specialty light bulbs (i.e. daylight ) the temperatures will vary.
I am looking forward to this challenge.
Mike, I like the tones. Did you achieve that with just the white balance tweak?
1. Auto. This is not far off from what the sky actually looked like. It should have been a little "bluer". Since it was auto I can't tell what temp was used.
2. Incandescent. The setting on my Nikon is 3000K.
This is a little too "blue.
3. Fluorescent. On fluorescent my Nikon allows me to choose from 2700-7200. This setting is "sodium vapor" at 2700K.
4. Manually set temperature to 10,000K (Blue Sky). I think the sun exploded in this one.
So you can see, like in Mike's photo, how White Balance can be used to either improve your natural photo or create art.
I'm thinking about all the times my people looked like smurfs or like they had liver disease.
Since it isn't part of the exif info, maybe we should try to add comentary about what we chose and why.
Courtney I appreciate your hosting, and I for one look at these more for the learning than winning. So whatever looks good to the judge is what wins. Choose what looks good to you.
Everything about photography is subjective.
I agree with @viranod about the way someone can do the challenge: first get the most realistic whitebalance and as a second the most beautiful in your opinion. Enjoy, with perfect or less perfect cameras!
Another great explantion for Elements: http://everydayelementsonline.com/2010/09/pse-tutorial-fix-wb-with-levels/
A video for Photoshop: http://www.5min.com/Video/Photoshop-Basics-Correcting-White-Balance-268546878
I am not familiar with either form of Photoshop, I use Lightrooms 3 and 4, with Aperture too. I hope these help answer your questions.
I do know that when you shoot in any of the Automatic modes, the camera is in control of the settings, so you have to make adjustments and corrections in post processing, which is a good reason why so many want to learn the manual settings. (Brains with knowledge and practice work better than electronic guesses most of the time :-) ).
Does your camera have semi-automatic settings, like an Aperture priority mode, or Shutterpriority mode? I know in my canon, I have control over the white balance in those modes.
I hope I answered your question and didn't ramble too much! Ask more!
http://store.rmimaging.com/digitalgraycard-100.aspx
I have one of them now and it really helps to set custom white balance. I don't mean to push a particular brand, but this one has held up well so far.
This hosta is under a couple of very large trees and the sky is overcast.
1. Auto White Balance in the camera. Not bad color but the hosta is not white.
2. Whibal (grey card). I took a photo of my grey card next to the hosta. Using the NEF file (RAW) I adjusted the white balance of the grey card in camera raw. After doing that I opened the NEF file for the hosta photo shot in Auto and adjusted the white balance to match the grey card. The temperature that it balanced to was 5300K. That is not cloudy or shade so what my eyes were telling me was not correct because this photo is the closest to the correct color.
3. Cloudy White Balance in camera. The white balance in this photo is a little "creamy" too much yellow but not all that bad.
Overall, because of the subject matter, the white balance on any of these would work but the grey card produced the closest match to color.
Also Laura, I love your examples and explanation of what you did!
Since those two adjustments darkened the photo I did a slight curves adjustment, noise reducion for the background and some sharpening.
The problem with using white is that white is not standard either. It can have blue, yellow or pink undertones. Of course I know people who have metered the palm of their hand and adjusted it in camera raw to set white balance. Actually I did it myself one day to see if it would work. It did. A little more work to adjust than setting white balance.
Note that I did set a black control point and darken midtones just slightly. Those are more for exposure than balance, though.
Tonight's dinner ingredients. Will be served with some sort of pasta.
It will pay to click on the image and read the description as it goes into a bit more detail.
Today I'm going to the Cincinnati Museum Center to see the A Day in Pompeii exhibit. This will entail indoor shooting with no flash and museum lighting. I'll decide what pic from yesterday or today I'm going to post tonight after I get home.
Thanks again, Courtney!
In this photo, The white balance of the guy is corrected (as seen in my MacbookPro 17inch LCD monitor). While the white-balance of the guy smoking is corrected, white-balance of the street behind him, and the part of sky-train above him is still too cold! can't have both.
When shooting in JPEG, you can do white balance correction, but you will be more limited in the amount you can alter it without significant image degradation. It's better to try and get the white balance at least close using the camera settings, if you don't use RAW.
Even if you do use RAW, using a gray card will still allow you to get a perfect white balance, which can save a lot of time compared to having to guess at what looks about right in post-processing.
Regarding @viranod's comment about not being able to have two settings, this is one of the reasons I like shooting in RAW (and hence having the ability to adjust after the fact). The problem seen in his shot is common, where you have two light sources of very different colour temperature. I had a similar problem with this shot I took a couple of weeks ago, as seen here straight out of camera:
I really wanted to give the light from the foreground buildings a nice warm, rich feel, while at the same time giving the sky and tower a deep, midnight blue colour, as you see at dusk. However, the foreground lighting was gas discharge and quite cold in colour. As you can see, in the shot above, the camera has picked a middle ground -- the building light is slightly greeny-blue, and the sky has gone slightly purple.
I could cool down the white balance and bring the sky to how it should be, but this made the buildings look awful, or I could warm up the white balance and make the buildings look nice, but the sky would go a crazy colour.
What I was able to do, as it was RAW, was do both. I processed the image with a warm white balance, making the building light nice and warm, and then processed it again with a cool white balance, making the sky look how I wanted it to. Blending the two photos together was relatively easy here, as I had a nice hard line between the building and the sky, but even in @viranod's shot it could be done.
The end result, for my photo:
Personally this was exactly the look I was picturing in my mind when I took the shot. (Cue everyone saying how they prefer the out-of-camera shot... ;) )
Just an example that in the digital age, you can sometimes have your cake and eat it. You'll find a lot of pros do this frequently, as in these days of incandescents, halogens, gas-discharge, LEDs and CFLs, it's very common to get a photo where you have two incompatible colour temperatures to deal with.
I shot this photo both as "shade" and "daylight". He was in the shade, the sun was setting behind the trees. The "daylight" exposure was actually closer to being correct, I believe that is because while he was in the shade my camera was pointed toward the setting sun, even though it was behind the trees.
There were a lot of challenges to getting this shot. First being the fact that he is behind a chain link fence. Focusing was pretty difficult but the sun being so low in the sky helped. I lucked out that he sat still for a couple of shots for me.
The "daylight" setting metered at 5000K. I corrected it to 5500K and made adjustment to both the white and black points. I did have to crop out a section to the left and above his head where the fence showed. I did a minor curves adjustment and noise reduction and some sharpening.
I did not use a grey card today because my 70-200 has a minimum focus of about 5' and it was not practical. This is the second time I have gotten these white balance results at the zoo so the next time I might try setting white balance manually to around 5600K and doing some test shots.
I know that the museum curators limited the lighting in the exhibition in order to protect the archaeological artifacts and to create a mood. However, this means that visitors don't get to see the true colours of the objects on display. Most of the time, everything appears with golden or orange cast as in this picture of an alabaster funerary urn:
My Canon 30D was set to the "auto white balance" setting. It looks pretty but striated alabaster should have shades of grey and green along with the white and cream colours. Also the dark grey fabric of the display base looks more brown than grey.
After taking a test shot of my 18% grey card, I used the "custom white balance" setting to get this picture:
The colours are now rendered as if the urn was being viewed under full sunlight; the grey and green tones of some of the striations are now apparent. This is a much more accurate rendering of the artifact. You can see that the display base is now grey instead of brown.
Lastly, and just for fun, I changed the 30D to the "color temperature" or "K" setting and clicked through four different temperatures. I put these four pictures together with the two pictures above and made this collage:
This was a fun and educational challenge. And I finally learned how to use the "custom WB" control on my camera!
Just one thing that might be worth mentioning reading your write-up (and great leopard shot): you mention that you didn't use a grey card because of the long minimum focus distance of your lens. Just so that people are aware, it's not actually necessary for your grey card to be in focus, it only needs to be in the frame. Indeed, if your grey card is in less-than-perfect condition (marked or creased), being out of focus can actually help!
Depending on your camera and focus settings, you may need to temporarily switch to manual focus on the lens to get the camera to take the out-of-focus shot of your grey card, but after that, the process is identical (just make sure to remember to switch it back to auto-focus!)
Finally, as it doesn't seem to have been mentioned here yet, many photographers use an ExpoDisc for taking their white balance shot. This is a diffusing filter that screws onto the front of your lens like any other filter, and effectively averages the colour balance of the entire scene as the lens is seeing it. They are used very similarly to a grey card -- you screw the filter on, take a photo (again, you might have to use manual focus, as the camera cannot focus with the filter on), and use the photo to set the white balance for the scene.
They are an expensive option, and I don't use one personally, but a lot of photographers swear by them, especially wedding photographers who move between different light sources frequently throughout the course of a day. If anyone is serious about getting their white balance absolutely correct in camera, you may wish to investigate further.
I use Capture NX2 and it's as easy as selecting the neutral point tool and then clicking on a gray area of the image with the tool. Sometimes I select the "wrong" gray area, but I just undo it and try another area. I believe there is similar functionality in Photoshop.
Your leopard image has lots of gray areas to sample with that tool.
I took way to many picures and ended up losing track of what settings I used. This one turned out the best, but I think it might still be a little to blue. I tried to get more red in, but then the darker fur was really red. I hope to try a few more before this challenge ends.
To get this shot I was handholding my 70-200mm f/2.8 leaning over a short fence to get close enough to the chain link to focus past it. I should have put the camera on the tripod, taken the white balance shot and then tried for the real shot but I wanted to get at least a couple of shots before anyone else came up to the enclosure. He does not like children, especially if they are noisy and also I really don't want any kids seeing me leaning over the fence and thinking it is okay to go past the fence. I got maybe 4 shots before someone came up with kids and that was the end of any photographs.
Mike, I use Camera Raw in Photoshop and it does have a white balance tool which usually works really well. When I used it on this photo all of the "grey" points on the left half of the photo pushed to far to the "blue" spectrum and the right half of the photo pushed too far to the "red" spectrum. I could have kept trying to get the right "grey" but I knew that my original white balance was just barely off so just took the easy way out.
If you look up near his head, the area that is reddish is the chain link fence where I didn't completely focus past it. There is another section on the right side down near his feet. And I cropped the photo on the upper left corner where the fence was the worst.
My Nikon meters the "sunny" White Balance at 5000K. Processing the grey card told me the correct White Balance should be 5400K with a tint of +11.
I think the next time I shoot "daylight" I will manually set White Balance to 5500, which is what the White Balance Charts say, and see how close I come to getting it perfect in the camera.
Processing the grey card gave me 5250K with a tint of -3.
Right off the bat I could tell the "cloudy" exposure was the furthest off.
The "sunny" exposure was a little blue looking but didn't look too bad.
What surprised me was that my manual setting of 5650K looked almost perfect on the monitor (since my grey card told me I needed a white balance of 5250K). So I opened it to process and photoshop said that it was 5300K, not the 5650K that I set in the camera. So in the end it was almost perfect. I set the exposure to +.2 and lowered the brightness to +25 (down from +50) and lowered the black to 0 (down from 5) I lowered the brightness and black because I would rather make that adjustment as a "curves" adjustment in photoshop. Like usual, a little bit of noise reduction and sharpening.
So my lesson for today is that my camera doesn't appear to meter exactly to Kelvin. It also explains why my "sunny" white balance meters 5000K when according to my manual it should meter 5200K. I will have to do some more testing to see if it is consistently off by 200-400K.
Another shot using white balance. I tried putting several pictures to compare together, but couldn't get my editing program to cooperate. So this is it. I do not appear to be able to set by temperature. This is using the shade setting (which it was taken in shade). The direct sunlight came out blue and the auto and cloudy shots were to yellow. I do have a setting to take a photo of a grey or white card, but don't have either (now that my husband knows, it might be a birthday present in the future).
I used a sheet of white copy paper to set my manual white balance setting that shot is on the left. Next is the auto white balance and incandescent on the right.
This was a great challenge. I've definitely gotten more comfortable using the white balance controls and am more confident that my photos will turn out the way I think they should.
It has been fun to watch people post their experiments and trials with this challenge. :)
Black is use more for shooting at night, for the Black Card method, which is tricky. I have never played with that. My understanding of that is it is used most often for sunsets and sunrises when the light is very dim.
What great timing that your cards came today! Yay!
My understanding of the black and white cards is they are used to set the black setpoint and white setpoint in an image. You *can* use the white card for custom white balance, but it's recommended to use the gray for that since that is how the camera's sensor is calibrated.
How are you liking the results of using the gray card? Also, which brand/model(?) of gray card set did you purchase?
This is an interesting challenge, I learned more about my camera WB settings. Although I use them when shooting, I knew nothing about the PRE setting on the Nikon. (same as K on Canon) Anyway I fooled around with it and will need to get one of those cards. This was a set up that was unusual because of the lighting from the window and incandescent also. Shot it incandescent and had to bump the exposure up in PP.
I like using the gray card - I can see how in some settings even more than others it will make a huge difference. I didn't see extreme difference for the flowers above - without in cloudy the colors were deeper. I realize that may be a desired effect but it's good to decide to change it in post processing rather than have it already determined for you.
Here is one from Apogee Photo.
http://www.apogeephoto.com/july2004/jaltengarten7_2004.shtml
Geoff Lawrence
http://www.geofflawrence.com/color_temperature.html
Color Basics: This is an article on color
http://www.colorbasics.com/ColorTemperature/
Cambridge in Color
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/white-balance.htm