White Balance
How can I improve the white balance in my photography?
I am a semi-pro photographer that needs some tips on getting stellar white balance. I use the cannon rebel. I think that my balance is ok, but I look at wedding photos that have stellar colors and I would like to know how to achieve it. Also, is the expo disk worth the purchase price.
The white balance presets on your camera are not always the best. They can come close, but it will often not be perfect for less than ideal outdoor conditions. Auto white balance usually always works perfectly well in outdoor, daylight conditions out of the shade.
Personally, I keep and use a grey card for situations when white balance is critical. I use a card call the Whi Bal. Here is the site:
http://www.rawworkflow.com/whibal/
I use the studio card size. But at any rate, all you do is take one shot of the card in the scene. I have often had the person hold the card while taking this one shot. This is then used as reference to set correct white balance in post processing. You shoot in RAW of course. In your software program, you will be able to place a color picker or eyedropper on the grey card and click it. This will instantly color correct the photo. You then apply these settings to your other photos taken under the same conditions. Just shoot another shot of the grey card if your lighting conditions change greatly.
You can also learn to do a custom white balance with the camera and a white object. This is a royal pain in the rear, at least it is for me. Canon makes this far too time consuming and button and menu fiddle intensive to be useful to me. Read your manual to learn how to perform it. Why they can’t have a simple, quick, one button push to do this with is beyond me.
Using flash can create it’s own problems. If you drag the shutter, such as a setting of 1/40 or slower to allow in more ambient light, you can then have problems of mixed lighting sources. This can be corrected with color gels on the flash, but that is a whole ‘nuther topic I will not go into here.
The Expo Disc is not something I would recommend. This is also used to set a custom white balance in the camera, so you are still going to have to go through the ridiculous, fiddly hassle of doing that… PLUS… the Expo Disc is an ambient device. You have to go to your subject and with the disc mounted on your lens, aim the camera back at the light source, or more easily, where you will be taking the photo from. So to use the disc, you 1. Screw it on your lens. 2. Do the menu and button push deal to get into custom white balance mode in the camera. 3. Go to your subject. 4. Aim the camera back to where YOU will be standing and take a photo. 5. Then do the selection process in the menu of the shot you just took to select that as your white balance to use for your photos. Have you EVER seen one of these things used by a pro at a wedding? Not hardly, and you never will. It will do a good job, but it is way too impractical and time consuming.
So the best, fastest, easiest all around solution for me has always been to just pull my Whi Bal card out of my pocket and shoot it in a scene as needed, then use that to correct the white balance later in the RAW processer. You can always keep your camera’s white balance settings on AUTO. One less button or menu to fiddle with in a stressful, fast moving shoot, the better off you are.
steve
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