How to get perfect white balance?
12.4.2010  |   Add comment   |   No comments  |  Permalink
Over the years I have learned that you can't always trust that you will find a spot in your photo from which you can obtain neutral gray to correct your white balance in Photoshop or Lightroom. It gets even worse if you start trusting your own eyes and you just didn't manage to calibrate your monitor. Sure, the skin looks great and natural on your monitor, but it might be that at your friend's computer your model looks pale or orange. Either way it's bad.

This is the reason why lately I have taken into habbit to use a gray card whenever I shoot more serious portraits, like my kids. I have a grey card I purchased from eBay that fits nicely into my camera backpack. The usage is really simple:

1. You always shoot in RAW mode, adjusting white balance in JPG images is a pain of a butt.

2. Before actual photo shoot and after you have set the shutter speed, aperture and your lighting, ask your model to hold the gray card and take a shot.

3. Start doing the actual photo shoot.

4. Open all photos in post production, in this example Lightroom.

5. First we process the reference picture we took in step 2. Take the white balance pippet (press W) and select a spot inside the gray card to set the neutral gray. You instantly notice and the skin tones become more natural.

6. You copy this white balance setting (Ctrl+C and then make sure you only check the White Balance) and paste that into all the rest photos from that current set.

Please note, that as the day goes by and you change locations, you need to take new reference shots as described in step 2. This is because the ambient light changes as well as other conditions.

Below two examples of my daughter hold a gray card. On the left side is the photo of imported RAW file into Lightroom and no processing done. On the right side the photo is color corrected by obtaining the correct white balance according to above instructions. Left photo might look OK to you if you wouldn't see the image on the right, but the truth is that the left image has a blue tint.


Raw white balance Corrected white balance





























You can get these gray cards really cheap on eBay. Try search with the keyword Ezybalance.