Post a Comment On: heather engen

I'm late with my post this week.  Sorry!  Instead of sitting here at my computer, giving you lots of helpful photography suggestions I was
supervising playdates (three of them, to be exact) enjoying a mother's day festivities at Kardynn's preschool reading books to Annika's first grade class babysitting Autumn traipsing around the National Zoo with Kiersten, Kardynn and a bunch of Kindergarteners  learning how to do flip turns in the pool This week will be spent recovering from last week!

A few weeks ago, my friend Julie asked me about white balance.  I meant to write about it in my last post but when I started to delve into 18% gray and gray cards, I got all caught up with metering and never wandered back to explain white balance.  Sadly this is how my brain works these days - there's a lot of wandering.  *sigh*

So back to white balance.  It's not difficult to understand how I got sidetracked by metering because there is a connection.  The sensors on your camera expect a scene to be a certain amount gray for metering purposes AND for white balance purposes...and they do a pretty good job.  But you can certainly improve the results in one of several ways.  First of all, your camera has some presets: daylight, shade, cloudy, fluorescent, flash, et cetera.  Typically there's also an option to create a custom setting. This is where the gray card comes in  handy.  You can take a picture of the gray card (make sure the card fills the viewfinder) in the lighting situation where you're about to take pictures, and then the white balance will be correct.  If you don't have a gray card, filling the frame with something white, to get a custom reading will also work. You can also take a picture of the gray card and use it to adjust white balance on your computer after the fact, but that's a lot more work.  Having said that, it might be preferable to accidentally leaving your camera with the wrong settings, which I've done a time or two.

If you want to get really fancy with color correction, here are some tips for correct skin tones. I have a little cheat sheet that I use for adjusting the magenta, yellow and cyan.  Caucasian's are 5-20% more yellow than magenta.  A fair-skinned caucasian might be 20% magenta and 25% yellow, whereas a bronzed person could be 45% magenta and 62% yellow.  Asians and Hispanics have 10-20% more yellow than magenta.  On black skin, the yellow and magenta are close. And what about cyan?  Cyan is 30-50% of magenta.  (I got this very useful information from this Smugmug help page.) I also got the free OnOne presets for Lightroom, which work great.  Unfortunately I don't typically use Lightroom but when I do, those presets are lifesavers.