I got a phone call yesterday from Nelson Vigneault CEO of CleanPix. “Your white balance (WB) on your camera is all messed up SIR”! Not something you want to hear. This was in reference to a set of photographs I took to assist the Florida Rep theater. I had done a studio shoot with strobes for their kids performance PR images. Nelson said that it took demanding Photoshop skills to get the pink/red color cast out of the photographs.
I shoot with a 2 year old Nikon D70S. I went and googled the problem and found this site by Ken Rockwell. The solution was toward the bottom of the page and this is what it said: “Try the Daylight setting to match carefully daylight balanced studio strobes”. Aha! I just excepted that the camera new best and had been setting it on the flash setting. Nelson commented: “In doubt, shoot a grey scale, that will tell you.”). I raced to my storage room and dug around in an old trunk of photo stuff from college days 28 years ago and found my grey scale. Then I did what I should have done in the beginning and ran a simple test with the camera. WOW! Sure enough the Flash WB setting gave a terrible cross curved pink photo. The Auto WB setting was a little better but still poor and the Daylight WB setting was pretty much spot on. Needless to say my computer screen is not calibrated. I sent the grey scale test pictures to CleanPix to be checked.
I stand corrected and somewhat ashamed but I now know how to better calibrate my camera for the white balance, or at least check if my settings are off. I would certainly recommend the purchase of a grey scale at your local photo store for some simple tests.
Getting It Right: Photo White Balance
I got a phone call yesterday from Nelson Vigneault CEO of CleanPix. “Your white balance (WB) on your camera is all messed up SIR”! Not something you want to hear. This was in reference to a set of photographs I took to assist the Florida Rep theater. I had done a studio shoot with strobes for their kids performance PR images. Nelson said that it took demanding Photoshop skills to get the pink/red color cast out of the photographs.
I shoot with a 2 year old Nikon D70S. I went and googled the problem and found this site by Ken Rockwell. The solution was toward the bottom of the page and this is what it said: “Try the Daylight setting to match carefully daylight balanced studio strobes”. Aha! I just excepted that the camera new best and had been setting it on the flash setting. Nelson commented: “In doubt, shoot a grey scale, that will tell you.”). I raced to my storage room and dug around in an old trunk of photo stuff from college days 28 years ago and found my grey scale. Then I did what I should have done in the beginning and ran a simple test with the camera. WOW! Sure enough the Flash WB setting gave a terrible cross curved pink photo. The Auto WB setting was a little better but still poor and the Daylight WB setting was pretty much spot on. Needless to say my computer screen is not calibrated. I sent the grey scale test pictures to CleanPix to be checked.
I stand corrected and somewhat ashamed but I now know how to better calibrate my camera for the white balance, or at least check if my settings are off. I would certainly recommend the purchase of a grey scale at your local photo store for some simple tests.
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