Q&A Tuesday: Why White Balance Matters
Today's question of the week comes from Miss B:
She asks, "do you have any tips to keep the skin tones in photos the same when editing throughout the session, aside from white balance?"
Why yes I do, Miss B. Here are four helpful tips to great skin tone in photos.
Tip 1: Don't shoot in JPG. Shoot in RAW. Most DSLR cameras allow you to have that option, and when you shoot in RAW, you can change the color temperature afterwards more readily. So in case your skintone is bluish to begin with, you can tweak it later.
Tip 2: Get it right in camera. Every time the lighting situation changes, change the white balance in your camera. I love to shoot in the shade, so my setting is almost always on "cloudy". If I'm shooting more in sunny weather, I'll be on the "daylight" setting. If I want to get very specific, I use "K" which stands for Kelvin. In the photo above, the coloration I liked at the end was close to 8600k. The higher the number in Kelvin, the warmer the photo is going to be.
Tip 3: Do your initial color temperature adjusting in Lightroom. Having the ability to adjust one picture, and then syncing a group of the photos to look the same is HUGE for consistency. Before I started using LR, my skin tones were all over the place. Your skin tones may not be exactly the same for the whole session, but from location to location, they need to look consistent.
Tip 4: Avoid using different photoshop actions for different photos in the same scene. When I first started out in photography, I had the Florabella actions, and while they were helpful in some instances, I had so many options that I just spent all my time playing around on the photos, and every photo ended up looking different. The end result was 30 pictures that looked like they came from different photographers. I had no style and no consistency. I finally settled on clean edits with color enhancements that look more "me". Less is more.
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Can you explain the photos above?
I can almost always spot a newer photographer by their use of white balance. I can relate because my first year in photography, I struggled with the funky blue skin tones. What I learned was to hardly ever shoot on Auto White Balance because AWB is not accurate. If you learned how to shoot your camera on manual, you should learn to adjust the color temperature on manual too.Shooting in the shade trips up so many photographers. Because the sun is not warming up spots in the shade, the color in a shaded area is naturally more blue. Blue skin, unless it's intentional, is not attractive. So above is a chart of a photo shot in very deep shade with all the most common outdoor WB settings. I hope it helps you in seeing what a difference WB makes.In case you don't make those changes in camera, you can change the color temperature in post-processing if you shoot in RAW.When you open up your photo in Adobe Camera Raw or LR, you come upon a slider like this one. Adjust it left for cooler tones, adjust it right for warmer tones.
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Thanks for tuning in!
Xoxo,
Ling