Of all the autoexposure features available in modern DSLRs, the one that is most frustrating for me is the Auto-WB. For years, I set the white balance to Auto-WB, hoping to be fine with the color in my digital images. Again, for all those years, my mind wasn’t tuned to deciphering the color issues. Recently, I noticed that some of my landscape shots looked too blue to me. Talking to a former photography student and now a good photographer himself, Sanjiv Kapoor, I learned how to adjust the color temperature and the tint sliders in Lightroom to get the right colors. Furthermore, I learned the idea of using a WB filter to reduce the guesswork involved in this exercise. Here’s how.
This is my process for RAW shooting. I attach an expodisc 2.0 WB filter to the front of the lens, in the light condition of the main shot, to make a reference image at metered exposure. It produces a perfect (18%) neutral gray image.
Neutral Gray Image made with a WB filter in the same light as the image subject. Caveat – if you are viewing this post in a monitor not correctly color calibrated, you are not seeing neutral gray.
Once opened in Lightroom, the default may not open up as neutral gray. It will open up with a default color temperature and tint, that may not be the real color temperature/tint. Drop the eyedropper from the Lightroom Develop Module into this image. That neutralizes any color cast in this reference and gives you the right white balance. Just apply the same color temperature and tint to the desired image. It is quite easy to do this in Lightroom, by simply “sync”ing the develop settings. In fact, I spend my time long enough on this reference (see the dust spot in it – I correct that, plus apply the lens profile etc), before “syncing” it to all the frames shot in the same light.
Here’s an example. As opened in Lightroom, the top image shown here is how it looked.
How this image looked when RAW file was opened up as default in Lightroom. Too blue and not representing what was seen.
This is too blue and did not represent what was seen. The color temperature was 5750 with a tint of -4. The neutral gray reference shot shown earlier had a color temperature of 8800 with a tint of -5. Upon correcting this image to that, the resulting final image is shown below.
Image with corrected white balance, with the aid of the expodisc 2.0
This represents what was seen.
Now that I have figured this out, and now that I have tuned my mind to seeing colors a bit better, I find all kinds of color errors all over my portfolio from years of work!! 🙂 As I find time, I will keep correcting the color of my past photographs, but I don’t have the reference shots to help me.
NOTE: The user’s manual for expodisc 2.0 talks about a different way to use it. Take a reference shot into the camera, by using a setting for white balance reference shot. Then the following images will be rendered correctly. In my honest opinion, this method is appropriate for jpg shooters. The method I outlined here is more suited for RAW shooters.