Photo Art
McKaso
Photography By: Steve Sullivan
TM
[ Back
[ Back
There are two items I prefer to use in the field to set the white balance of my camera and I never leave home without one of these in my camera bag. One is the Black Cat exposure guide and the other is the Lastolite Ezybalance “pop-up” gray/white card. The Black Cat exposure guide is a small tri-fold guide with many exposure setting suggestions, a exposure dial and a gray card on the back. It can be easily carried. Jim Doty has an excellent article on how to use the Black Cat exposure guide. The Ezybalance card is easy to carry in its own bag, collapses quickly, has a focusing target and comes in several sizes. It can be used quickly in the field to set your cameras custom white balance, which decreases the amount of time you need to spend in Photoshop correcting the exposure and color.
Many times a cameras Auto White Balance (AWB) is fooled by the lighting in a scene and can render a scene with blue, orange or green color casts because it sees light differently than your eye. Depending on the light source the color temperature will change. For instance candlelight has a color temperature of 1000-2000 Kelvin, which gives of a very reddish-orange hue, while florescent light has a color temperature of 4000-5000 Kelvin and creates a greenish hue and a partly cloudy day has a color temperature of 9000-10000 Kelvin and has a very blue hue. A gray/white card when metered or shot can render a more true exposure for the scene you are shooting. This helps the camera identify what is truly white or neutral in the scene and once it has benchmarked this it can properly balance all the colors in the spectrum of the scene, thus reducing the time you need to spend in Photoshop correcting this yourself. A few extra minutes in the field could save an hour using the computer.
There are two ways to use the gray cards. The first is to select the custom white balance setting in you camera then zoom in on the card so it fills the entire frame and take a reading off the card and adjust your camera to the setting. On my camera I need to take a photo of the card filling the frame and set the custom white balance to that specific shot. Be sure to read your cameras instructions as this procedure will vary depending on make and model.. Also be sure the card is placed in the same lighting as your subject you are going to photograph. The second way is to include the card somewhere in the actual photo and take one shot. Then remove the card for the remaining shots. Open the image with the card in Photoshop and using the levels adjustment window select the gray dropper and click on the gray card. The exposure color balance is automatically corrected. You can also do this in batch mode.
An excellent article on this subject can be found on Mike McElhatton’s website (www.digitalartsphotography.com/instructions.htm)
The best way to learn this is by reading your cameras instruction manual and practice to learn what your camera can do. With practice you will begin to understand how your camera views the light and you will notice that you can see the light as your camera would. This is just a brief explanation and much more in-depth information on this topic can be found on the links page in the How-to section or by doing a quick Google search.
Many times a cameras Auto White Balance (AWB) is fooled by the lighting in a scene and can render a scene with blue, orange or green color casts because it sees light differently than your eye. Depending on the light source the color temperature will change. For instance candlelight has a color temperature of 1000-2000 Kelvin, which gives of a very reddish-orange hue, while florescent light has a color temperature of 4000-5000 Kelvin and creates a greenish hue and a partly cloudy day has a color temperature of 9000-10000 Kelvin and has a very blue hue. A gray/white card when metered or shot can render a more true exposure for the scene you are shooting. This helps the camera identify what is truly white or neutral in the scene and once it has benchmarked this it can properly balance all the colors in the spectrum of the scene, thus reducing the time you need to spend in Photoshop correcting this yourself. A few extra minutes in the field could save an hour using the computer.
There are two ways to use the gray cards. The first is to select the custom white balance setting in you camera then zoom in on the card so it fills the entire frame and take a reading off the card and adjust your camera to the setting. On my camera I need to take a photo of the card filling the frame and set the custom white balance to that specific shot. Be sure to read your cameras instructions as this procedure will vary depending on make and model.. Also be sure the card is placed in the same lighting as your subject you are going to photograph. The second way is to include the card somewhere in the actual photo and take one shot. Then remove the card for the remaining shots. Open the image with the card in Photoshop and using the levels adjustment window select the gray dropper and click on the gray card. The exposure color balance is automatically corrected. You can also do this in batch mode.
An excellent article on this subject can be found on Mike McElhatton’s website (www.digitalartsphotography.com/instructions.htm)
The best way to learn this is by reading your cameras instruction manual and practice to learn what your camera can do. With practice you will begin to understand how your camera views the light and you will notice that you can see the light as your camera would. This is just a brief explanation and much more in-depth information on this topic can be found on the links page in the How-to section or by doing a quick Google search.
