noise to signal

The WhiBal

One of the great things about digital photography is how many choices it's given us that we didn't have before. A good example is film speed: With film, unless you're shooting with certain specific kinds of cameras (or you're willing to suffer tiresome workarounds), once you put a roll of 100 speed film in, you're basically stuck at that speed until you've finished the roll. With digital, if you go from a bright situation to a dark one and back again, you can switch film speeds to your heart's content.

You can do the same thing with color balance, too. Briefly, for those of you who don't know about color balancing: light comes in different colors. Straight sunlight is white; sunsets obviously are more orange. Cloudy days are much more blue, indoor (tungsten) lights are very orange (which you've noticed if you've taken pictures on film indoors without flash), and flash is slightly more blue than daylight. Professional photographers doing "color critical" work on film will use an elaborate system of color meters and filters to balance the light before it gets to the film, and work hard in the darkroom to make sure the color is exactly right (or, in my case, as right as I was willing to spend the time for).

In digital, you can do the same thing with color balance you can do with film speed. Outside? Set it to daylight. Inside? Set it to... uh... whatever inside is. A little lightbulb, usually. I can't remember. I don't really pay attention much because I always shoot in RAW mode, rather than JPEG, which means that I can easily change the white balance after the fact. I open the RAW file in Photoshop, choose the color balance I want, and... it's still not quite right.

This is a fundamental problem with color balance: the presets are never quite right. Tungsten lights change color over their lifetime. Fluorescent lights are all over the map. Sunlight with a bit of cloudyness is going to be slightly blue. And so forth. Now, in Photoshop, you can tweak the color balance to your heart's content, but that takes a long time.

The solution, and the point of all of that long, overwordy introduction, is to have a neutral reference point to balance off of. And the excellent tool I've been using for that for a few months is called a WhiBal.

You can follow that link to learn everything the manufacturer wants you to know about it, watch the video demos, and find ordering information -- it's about US$40. I'm just going to show you some examples of how much of a help it is. And no, I'm not getting a kickback from them, although I've sold enough of these for them I should (hint, hint, Michael :-)

Here we have a scene lit by sodium vapor lamps, which may look vaguely familiar. On the left is the original scene; on the right is my reference photo of the WhiBal card.

And here are the corrected versions, sampling off of the WhiBal card.

Now, I could have corrected it by hand to get that color -- but this is so much faster and easier that there's really no point.

Here's another example. These daffodils were on our kitchen counter, under our tungsten lights that have yellow glass shades. On the left, obviously, the uncorrected one. And remember, the entire process was "open both files in Adobe Camera RAW, sample off of the WhiBal card, click done." It just about took more time to type that than to do it.

One point I want to make clear is that this isn't just for extreme situations like the tungsten and sodium vapor lights in the previous examples. Here's a picture of Rusty I took outside our house. On the left, the uncorrected one looks OK, really -- a little blue, maybe, but still basically fine. The corrected image on the right, though, is a much richer and more accurate image.

So, go check the WhiBal out. It's a huge timesaver and a great tool.