ESFotoClix Blog

One often hears the advice to not worry too much about White Balance (WB) in the field. Shoot RAW, and you can always correct it later. This begs the question: correct it to what? If you have photographic memory and can remember exactly what the colors looked like when you pressed the shutter, then you will be able to tweak away until you get your photograph to look just right. On the other hand, if like me you can’t remember what color socks you are wearing right now, you may need to take care of WB on the spot, or you may need to decide that you will approach WB by feel, i.e., what looks best to you, in post-processing.

As we briefly saw in our previous blog entry, this presents you with a choice:

1. Do you want the colors to accurately reflect the scene as you photographed it, sometimes called achieving actuality, or
2. Do you want the colors to feel right, as in, for example, making sure that white is true white and not a color-cast version of white?

One the most challenging shooting scenarios I often encounter involves subjects lit under staged lighting. Here the two-way choice for WB proves difficult. On the one hand one can go for naturally looking skin tones, but if the stage lighting is producing a color cast, keying on known whites and grays in ViewNX (or alternatively setting WB per a white/gray card on the spot), will produce non-actual colors in the rest of the scene. The skin tones (and clothing) will look natural, but you’ve effectively altered the way the scene looked. Let’s examine this by example.

Here’s the original version, as shot, with a WB manual setting of 3450K. I arrived at that setting by using the Liveview mode in my Nikon D90 to view the scene as I adjusted the WB temperature until what I saw in the LCD screen matched the scene. Unfortunately, this is only good enough to get in the ball park. The camera’s LCD screen is not color calibrated and could lead me astray. Nonetheless, the unpleasant orange skin tones we see in the original capture are real, a byproduct of the stage lighting’s color cast.

Deciding to try for more natural skin tones would win over “actuality” for this shot, I first tried the Incandescent (3000K) setting. The orange skin is gone, but is now replaced by too much pink.

Fortunately, we have some candidate whites and grays in the scene. The white blouse on the right seems at first like a good candidate for setting WB with the eye-dropper, but unfortunately, it is too bright. The gray in the risers where the choir members are standing, however, does the trick.

This final try produces the most pleasant results for the skin tones, and a quick check of the white blouse reveals we have nearly achieved true white. However, the rest of the colors, in particular that blue background, no longer match the colors in the actual scene. To make a final decision on whether this is acceptable, we ask ourselves the “what is this photograph about” question. The most obvious answer is that the subject is the lead singer, and since his portrayal is what’s important, a determination to keep his skin tones from being a distraction is probably the most reasonable approach.