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This is how Illuminati color meter can help you improve photos and videos

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From time to time, there are very interesting photography-related campaigns on Kickstarter. One of them is Illuminati, a wireless light and color meter for photography and filmmaking. It syncs with your smartphone to help you adjust the lights on set, measure white balance even in the trickiest situations and set your camera to take the color-correct shots.

There are a few benefits to using this gadget to improve your photography and videos. In his recent video, Jay P. Morgan gives you several reasons why you should use this color meter and how you can benefit from it.

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How to fix colour casts with neutral density long exposures

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Anybody who’s ever used strong neutral density filters knows about colour casts. Whether it’s the B+W 10 Stop or the Lee Big Stopper, they’re just inevitable. Each filter presents a different colour cast. The same filter can also offer a different colour cast on different camera bodies. The typical way to deal with it is to play around with your white balance to try and correct for it.

Without a good reference, though, shifting the white balance to fix it in post can be a bit of a crap shoot. This video from Mike Browne talks through the problem, and shows a couple of different ways to make adjustments to fix colour cast issues. One is by setting your white balance in the camera, the other is by shooting a neutral reference that will let you do it in post.

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You can now get a fader filter to adjust your scene’s colour temperature

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This is a strange one, and I’m not quite sure how I feel about it yet.  The new ICELAVA Warm-to-Cold fader is a new filter which offers a stepless level of white balance adjustment from 2900K to 6300K.

It works similarly to a circular polariser or variable neutral density filter.  You screw it onto your lens, and then the front rotates to change the effect seen through your lens, but I’m really not getting the point.

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Using CTO & CTB Utility Gels for Creative Effect

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As a lot of you may know, I like to use the occasional gel in my shots to add a bit of interest. Sometimes these gels are rich and vibrant colours that drench an image in saturation and other times I just want to add a little something extra colour-wise without overpowering the whole image with a synthesised coloured look.

For a more subtle colour look you’ll want to use tones that our eyes are more accustomed to seeing, for example orange and blue tones are heavily present in our daily visual journeys already. Orange tones are found in sunrises and sunsets and blueish tones are often found in twilight and overcast days. These are what I call ‘natural’ colours compared to the rich pinks and purples or reds, these are great for adding effect but can sometimes overpower an image quite quickly. The ‘natural’ tones that I am referring to are measured in Kelvin and we use this value to adjust the white balance of our shots in our cameras.

So to add a more natural colour effect to your shots what better place to start than by looking at the tones already found in the Kelvin values in your camera via the the white balance. I’m sure we all know we can add a little extra warmth to a shot simply by increasing the Kelvin via the white balance  and conversely we can cool down an image be decreasing the Kelvin value.

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Using white balance for setting the mood in a photo

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White balance, something we’re all familiar with these days. Be it setting it to a preset on the camera, dialing it in by eye or perhaps even going as far as to using a colour checker passport / grey card to nail it in camera. It seems that most of the time, a lot of people are either using white balance to “start from an accurate base” so that any tweaks they do in post or Lightroom etc start from “0” so to speak, or, they just leave it on auto.

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Awesome Cold Look With CTO Gel And Tweaking White Balance

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A few weeks back I wrote an article about stopping down the ambient light by 2-3 stops and using flash to expose for your subject, kind of a Magic Bullet look. Today I wanted to make an addition to that article – how you can add a CTO gel to your flash and change your white balance to get a different feel and add “Whapak” to your shot.

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Worry Free Digital White Balance – The 0.05 Cent Expodisc

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One of the great advantages of working with RAW files is the ability to control the white balance in post production. For example, if you have mistakenly forgot to move your white balance settings from shade to tungsten when you switched location, you can spend two minutes in Lightroom, Photoshop or Adobe Bridge and make the red blue again.

But, but… What if you could make sure that your white balance setting is perfect every time? You can then save on precious post processing time and deliver your images straight from the camera.

ExpoImaging has a nice little product that will help you hit the correct white balance mark on every location. The ExpoDisk is a little device you can use to get a precise white balance reading from any situation. Here is how the general idea, demonstrated on the ExpoDisk (DIY version, right after…):

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