Unless we use precise adjustments or a grey card, some cameras tend to make the white balance a little off. This especially holds true for phone cameras, and I must admit that my Nikon doesn’t do a great job in some conditions, either. But it can be an easy fix. In fact, there are several ways to make it just right, and Cristi Kerekes presents you with three of them that he finds the simplest and the most helpful.
Auto white balance in phone cameras kills real color in wildfire photos
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Massive wildfires are currently raging in the US West Coast. The skies have been colored orange and red, but you might not be able to accurately capture it with your phone camera. Many people have noticed that auto white balance on phone cameras is severely affecting orange and red hues. This makes this whole tragedy look way less dramatic and alarming than it is.
Are you still chasing “perfect” colour?
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It’s my belief that colour is actually one of the most subjective elements that we as humans all understand, yet we actually have no real way of enforcing or translating it to one another.
Think of colour like a language. I may say the word ‘Red’ to you and you will have an idea of what I mean, but it’s still extremely vague.
Quick Photoshop tip: how to remove unwanted color cast in only a few clicks
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There are times when your photos can get an unnatural-looking color cast. You can fix it in post and fine tune it so it looks more natural. In this video from Adobe Creative Cloud, you’ll learn how to neutralize unwanted color cast in only a couple of clicks, in literally a few seconds.
This is the quickest way to color correct a photo in Photoshop
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There are several ways to color correct your images in Photoshop and Lightroom. In this video, Jesús Ramirez of Photoshop Training Channel gives you a tip that will speed up this process significantly. He teaches you how to set Photoshop’s algorithms in only a few seconds, so you can change the white balance in a single click next time you need it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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