Practicing and Screaming

[Weird Girl]

Who here has gotten to the point where you want to throw things violently because no matter what you do, your pictures are not turning out the way you want!? Well... I'm at that point!!! By no means am I going to give up but here was my issue....

I started outside with this shoot and ended inside- actually this was the very last photo taken in the series... Anyway, outside or inside, my pictures were too orange. I played with the white balance, tried every setting (except cutsom because I don't know how to yet) and they were either orange/yellow or blue- no in between. This was taken at a friends studio and her lights are a lot whiter than mine but still, I played with ISO, shutter speed, aperture, angles, distance, and NOTHING made them look right!!! I had to turn up the blues in pp to rid the yellow- is it too much? Just throw out any comments you can cuz this girl (me) needs help!

Nikon D300s
17-70mm lens (Sigma)
f4 (focused right on her eyes)
1/100
ISO 250
Edited in Lightroom

[sk66]

White balance is probably the one thing I worry about the least. I always adjust in post even if it's "right".

My favorite tools for this are "levels" or "exposure" using the droppers to set the w/b points. That's what I did here. No idea if it is "right" as I didn't see the original scene.

BTW, IMO a little too much blue in your edit.

[Rentham]

Other than her miserable expression, I like this image quite a bit actually. But since you seem to be very frustrated with color correction, I put together a little example on how I do it. Hope you don't mind the slight threadjack.

First and foremost, unless your monitor is calibrated none of this will matter anyway. So if you haven't already, buy one of the many devices on the market and calibrate your monitor.

Then buy the X-Rite Color Checkcheck Passport. You basically take a picture of the little color chart in various lighting conditions then the included software will create custom profiles for your camera. For example, when using the standard Adobe profile my 5DMKII is way too strong in the magenta tones. The custom profile will correct things like that and also give you much more accurate color rendition across the board.

Then you can use the ColorChecker to do a custom white balance. You can chose either a neutral grey or the variety of "creative white balance" swatches they include. Here's an example of the differences:


Custom Profile and White Balance by Rentham, on Flickr

[Weird Girl]

I like your edit much better! Yes, mine was too blue. I am using Lightroom right now because I don't want to overwhelm myself just yet... I do have PS4 and Elements but not ready to punch my wall So in your edit, can you put into Lightroom terms what I would do? Would I move my slider to more yellow instead of blue? Would I just adjust exposure? I feel like I see others play with the lights, darks, shadows, and highlights but it seems when I venture into that, I end up with BLAH- usually grey...

Thanks for the white balance explanation! Feel free to take over any thread of mine you want! I just want to learn and get it right so badly! My Nikon D300s is new to me so today I am going to read and play with settings, the WB modes, and even venture into custom settings... but this program you speak of- will that just take the manual changing of my camera settings out of the equation? Sorry, I am trying to grasp the concept... the WB settings that are in the camera seem to make more sense now but I tried all of them that day... I just have to keep working at it I guess... I will read up on these programs though... I think I need a second job to support this LOL

[Weird Girl]

Oh- and yes, she looks miserable HAHAHA but I wasn't even worrying about that at the time (she was there for me to practice)

[Weird Girl]

Oh- I now see that you said to use the eyedropper- I did play with that but wasn't sure where to put it- where did you put it on my image? Man, this seems hard but Ken Rockwell said it's really not LOL

[Rentham]

Originally Posted by Weird Girl

but this program you speak of- will that just take the manual changing of my camera settings out of the equation?

The program makes camera profiles available to you in Lightroom. So in the Develop module in the Camera Calibration section you'll have your custom profiles available to you in the Profile drop down menu.

In the image above I picked the custom profile I set up for my studio work. You can see it removes the yellow and gives her a more accurate skin tone. That is still the native "flash" white balance of my camera, just with a more accurate camera profile. Everything is still a little magenta, so I then used the WB eyedropper to select the medium grey swatch on the chart which then neutralizes the color, as you see the background going grey.

Sounds complex in theory, but is dead simple in practice.

[inkista]

Just checking, but you're shooting RAW, right? If you're shooting JPEG, go back, and set the camera into RAW. RAW essentially gives you the freedom to choose whatever white balance setting you want after the fact, which is why we don't worry so much about it when shooting.

Secondly, if you're using lights, make sure that your lights are gelled to be the same color as the ambient lighting, otherwise, you've got mixed lighting, and that's a whole 'nother PITA. If your lights are blue/white, but the ambient is yellow, if you white balance for the ambient, whatever you lit goes even bluer. But if you balance for the lit areas, then the ambient goes more orange.

Thirdly, use the eyedropper to sample anything in the image that should be a neutral tone: white/gray. That will get you in the ballpark. Using a reference with a calibrated neutral tone, like a grey card/color reference is the most accurate, but you might be able to get away without it. Be aware, though, that if you use a color reference like this, you will be balancing to the color of the actual object, not necessarily the color of the object as you saw it, depending on the lighting conditions. It can also be a great way to wipe out the gold of golden hour.

[Weird Girl]

Wowza ok I will look more into all of this haha