White Balance Tools

Hello again,

I did a post on my Flickr page recently and one of my images still had my Spyder Cube in it as a Grey Card" reference - Which prompted questions on: "WHY?"

So, here's a quick explanation.

All lighting sources have different color temperatures to them. From warm sunlight to yellowish/green fluorescents and blueish tungsten incandescent bulbs. You want to get your White Balance set so that white colors in your image are actually white and not tinted to some other yellow/green/blue shade. With your camera on Auto White Balance, it's going to try and do this for you - Notice I said "try". Generally they do OK, but for accuracy you use a Grey Card. And shot RAW if possible.

Essentially, you're using the black, white and grey areas as a 'known reference' colors in a scene. Most photo processing software such as Photoshop and Lightroom have an Eyedropper tool that allows you to click on a "Grey Card" to set your White Balance - You're telling the software that this is a known, calibrated 18% Grey color, it will then calibrate the rest of the colors to match. You can also use in either Levels or Curves the Black, Grey and White Eyedroppers to set what are called "Black Point & White Point".

Once you've done that for the image with the cube or grey card in it, you save those settings, then when you open up any of the other images with the same lighting, just paste those settings to them (depending on which software you're using) and this allows you to batch process photos for proper White Balance and Exposure.

Now, in this image I've not only left the Spyder Cube in (just for fun), I've also done some extra tweaking of colors too. Go to my Flickr link to see the rest of the set - Playing with toys.

Here's a link to DataColor's tutorials on how to use the Spyder Cube. 

spyder.datacolor.com/learn_videos.php

Next post, which is coming up soon, will be on Night Photography.

Thanks again for coming by and reading my blog.