A quickie about White Balance

[Kev M]

I had my first trip to a studio last week and I'm finally getting around to processing the images (130+ reduced down to only 70ish by the time I'd weeded out the real crap). Despite using the flash setting the WB doesn't quite look right so I'm trying to correct it. After reading an article recently I thought flash heads were around 5600K but both Photoshop and RSE correct it to about 3500K. To me they look alright at 3500K but I've no real experience of trying to replicate accurate skin tones.

What do you reckon?

 

[Kev M]

Here's an example of what I'm on about.

Camera Flash WB setting (about 5300K)

Magazine suggestions of 5600K

and RSE auto white balance which is miles away from the other two but looks right to me. 3400K

 

[CT]

These are all waaay out Kevin. The whole purpose of setting white balance (just to state the obvious) is that you're telling the camera what white looks like under any prevailing light, and regardless of any colour casts which might be falling on that white. Assuming this should be a white background? then you have a strong red/orange cast in the first two shots, clearly seen in the bg and the lad's white shirt. The skin tones are also looking very red.

In the last shot the cast has changed to blue and the skin tones are looking very blue as a result.

I assume you've shot jpegs in which case the safest way to set wb is to take a custom wb shot under the studio light setup, or set the wb in degs Kelvin based on a few test shots first.

By far the best thing to do is to shoot RAW files, where no WB is assigned to the image and you can set any wb you like in processing. If you have a lot of images you could spend a lot of time messing about with these shots in processing and still not get the wb as it really should be.

Hope that helps a bit mate. You could always convert to mono.

 

[RobertP]

I try to leave the WB alone in my shots as I am slightly red green colour blind. When it is obviously wrong I use the dropper tool in rawshooter to pick something that is white or grey in the image to set the white balance. I seem to get away with it most of the time

 

[CT]

I try to leave the WB alone in my shots as I am slightly red green colour blind. When it is obviously wrong I use the dropper tool in rawshooter to pick something that is white or grey in the image to set the white balance. I seem to get away with it most of the time

Best way to do it anyway Robert.

 

[Kev M]

Nope I shot in RAW which will make it easy to go back and batch change the wb on everything. I realised the first two had an orange cast but that was with the WB adjusted on the computer to 5600K which is what I'd read in the magazine was the colour temp of flash heads (give or take a few K).

Using the whitedropper on the white background gives me the slightly blue cast but I would have thought 3400K is way off for flash lighting. Unless 3400 is about right and the tint needs adjusting?

 

[Wile E. coyote]

Using the whitedropper on the white background gives me the slightly blue cast but I would have thought 3400K is way off for flash lighting. Unless 3400 is about right and the tint needs adjusting?

Try the whitedropper on the white of the eye, I find in most cases it produces the best results

 

[ppp]

just grabbed the white eyedropper in cs2 and clicked on the background, nothing else, obviously you could play more and get some great results from the raw file