Great expressions may sell the image, but great color and exposures equal lasting value. Emotional value, that is, which translates to dollars as well as expression. Wedding photos are not snapshots. Facebook quality is not good enough. These are the fine points.
Which of these color balances do you prefer emotionally? No wrong answer here, just what you and your client like best.
F/stops and shutter speeds are important of course, and preferably not automatic settings at all for white balance. Even though auto white balance camera presets have improved dramatically, there’s much more you can do with minimal extra time and effort.
What’s so important about white balance? Weddings are driven by color, and careful white balance brings those colors alive again. Everybody craves beautiful, clear, saturated colors of dresses, flowers, decor, location and on. But it does even more: white balance sets mood and emotion, because not everything is bright and clear. Romance can be a dim, warmly yellow dance floor or a dark blue silhouette of a stolen kiss.
You can tell that white balance is the most important thing, because all the postproduction software like Photoshop and Lightroom clearly show WB the first correction to be done when optimizing an image. The first thing. Even exposure comes second! Correct your WB, and your exposure will start to come into place. Your postproduction becomes less. Lack of thoughtful WB really can destroy an otherwise good image. You can do a lot in post, but you can’t really fix a bad concept.
Yellow rules: here's how it’s both good and bad in images
Prove the value of white balance to yourself. At weddings yellow is usually the difficulty. You have to decide when to allow tungsten illumination to be it’s natural yellow and when to correct it. Yellow is a tricky subject, because it’s how we see things bright, light and open. Lose the yellow and images become dull, drab and dark when you don’t want them to. Yellow directly affects your exposure level, which means that it’s wise to decide ahead of time what mood you want to project.
The yellow color corruption problem is most evident when you try to correct the typical, overly yellow cast from church interiors and halls. Lighting is already dim and you’ll find you need to push the ISO higher. Fortunately this is now much less concern-making than in the past when noise quickly corrupted an image at around 800 ISO. It’s been my experience that no matter what kind of camera you use, a dim, tungsten-lit environment will beg for a slightly brighter, more neutral tone when you look at it on the computer and start to make a wedding album sequence.
When you start to pull the blue-yellow slider (Temperature) to the left to correct yellow, you’ll see your image become darker and duller real time. It’s a slippery slope.To counteract Termperature change you must significantly increase Exposure and probably also Brightness. Change in Exposure means you are effectively upping the ISO, thus adding noise and possible unattractive color cross-overs. If your wedding was in available darkness, you were probably using a fairly high ISO already, and now it goes even higher. Image quality can be significantly compromised, as well as increased noise.
In my informal survey, photo lab managers tell me that even the most basic digital understanding and skills are not the norm. More than half their clients, some say as many as 75% of clients, have never taken their cameras off automatic settings. Why are photographers not taking advantage of the many controls and options camera manufacturers have designed to help combat wildly varying conditions and exacting client expectations?
3 points to remember about White Balance
- Excess yellow is always the worst offender, and the most damaging to repair.
- Everyone relies on the LCD to gauge image quality. In my experience, WB actually can be fairly closely judged in this way, contrary to some advice you may hear. Just look carefully, and know the bias of your camera make and model.
- Custom white balance can be very close to perfect, if you have lots of time and a controlled, studio environment. It just takes time and a white balance device. I recommend the Ed Pierce Digital Calibration Target or the ColorRight disc. That’s another blog entirely, but here we’re talking about what you can do on the fly.
How to improve your white balance skill
- Start by trying out all the presets you have available. Maybe even keep several test series for reference; watercolorists do something similar with their tints. A totally inaccurate setting, say tungsten setting for fluorescent light, may give you a special effect for later artistic use.
- If you’re doing something radical with WB, make a duplicate image of the same scene with as close to accurate white balance as possible in case you change your mind later.
- Many video and film makers “zero” their settings for capture and apply effects only in post.
Demystifying Kelvin
Working with yellow, magenta and cyan in some of the postproduction adjustments versus Temperature and Tint - two sliders instead of three - made me start thinking about the Kelvin measure of light and how it relates to Temperature in post. I queried the late guru Bruce Fraser, who replied that the Temperature slider actually approximates teal to orange, not just blue to yellow, and Tint is really more like chartreuse to purple. Temperature is the most critical control, especially in capture, with Tint being easier to fix in post.
The Kelvin WB setting in your camera can really work well for you!
- Candle and match flames1,000-2,000K
- Early sunrise & late sunset 2,100-2,900K
- Household light bulbs 2,500-2,900K
- Quartz lamps 3,100-3,500K
- Mixed room light 3,700-4,400K
- Speed lights & noon sun 5,000-5,600K
- Overcast daylight & north sky 6,000K and up - way up
These are pretty standard figures; circumstances and taste differ, of course.
If you’re a Canon 5D Mark II or Mark III shooter, finding the right Kelvin setting is easy and a big eye-opener. Go to Live View, the video mode setting. In the window for WB settings, move through the various presets including and then to Kelvin. You’ll see the effects live on the LCD. When you’re set on Kelvin, you can move to any temperature to select the exact level you prefer right as you turn the dials before going back to still mode. Way easy. Of course when the time of day changes or you go into a new interior, repeat the procedure.
Can you stand one more tweak? As you become more precise about settings, try going to white balance shift graph in your camera’s menu. Move the point on the graph incrementally toward blue, green, magenta or amber. This is really fine point tweaking!
Even if you mainly use P, T or A automatic exposure control, careful WB will boost your image quality 100%. It’s your chance to be a hero, to be better than average, whether you optimize your own images or hire a lab to do this for you. Brides don’t want green dresses in one picture and pink in the next. Labs will love you. Postproduction will be quicker and more consistent.
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