Archive for the ‘white balance’ tag
Setting Your White Balance Correctly Using a White Coffee Cup Lid
While hunched over a coffee cup and mentally composing an image, I realize the light is weird. I am seeing multiple light bulbs casting different colors of light. I realize the best image result will come from my setting the white balance, but I do not have an Expodisc or a grey card available. Not all is lost however. I do have a coffee cup lid. With that, white balance can be set. I usually keep my camera on auto white balance and make note of the light to adjust things later. That way, I can get a decent white balance setting. There are many ways to set the white balance. Here are some examples.
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Color Theory, The Ricoh GXR and Saving an Impossibly Colored Image
Save Me...
During the Ricoh GXR review, I shot a photo at night of a couple of flowers in my front yard. The problem is that this was shot during nighttime with no extra light besides the illumination from the orange colored street lamps. The flowers in the photo are supposed to be white, the bricks tan, and the plants themselves a healthy shade of green.
After weeks of working in Lightroom 3 on and off, I have finally rescued the image by taking my time and reassessing the reasoning behind color theory. While it looks like and seems like an easy fix, it really isn’t. Here’s how you can rescue an impossibly white balanced image; after a couple of basics.
Editor’s Note: This is a long post. So stay with us and you’ll be very well rewarded with a treasure chest of knowledge.
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Five Tips on How to Take Better Portraits in Natural Light
There are some photographers that will only shoot in natural light. Indeed, when my good friend Jason tested out a Hasselblad H4D, he shot with his own natural light studio. If you want to take the minimalist approach, here are a couple of tips on how to do just that.
Solving White Balance Issues With the ExpoDisk
“I want to get it all right in camera,” is a statement made by many photographers and is what many actually strive for but sometimes fail at. The ExpoDisk was designed to help remedy those problems just a little bit with white balancing issues. As a cost-effective and highly portable option, it has very quickly become an item that I never forget in my camera bag.
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Cross Processing an Image in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3
Cross Processing—it’s been all the rave for quite some time now and you’ve probably seen it all over the interwebs. Back in the film days, cross processing meant developing your film with the wrong chemicals in order to get some weird and kooky effects. In the digital age, it can be done with manipulation and understanding of color theory. Though I’m often one to go against trends myself, I’ve done this for wedding clients and they loved it. Since many readers of this site use Adobe Lightroom 3, I’m going to show you step by step and screenshot by screenshot just how to do this and without dropping hundreds of dollars on a Lomography camera and film. However, I’ll also tell you that if you haven’t tried the plastic cameras, you should do so at least once.
If you want to read more, you can read about processing the image in Photoshop Elements as well.
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Things Photo Geeks Need to Stop Bitching About
There are problems that photo geeks often complain about when looking at reviews of lenses, cameras, etc. You’ll read them over and over again on forums, in review comments, etc. Often, the complaints will become so great that they don’t realize that there is a solution to the problem that they’re complaining about. Here are some of those problems that photo geeks need to stop complaining about.
