> I hope to shoot digital next year and will probably white balance in situ > rather than in "post."
Hi Shangara. Not having but some 1-2% of your knowledge and expertise in Photoshop, I never thought I could offer you a piece of advise, but this one I can tell with absolute confidence. Custom white balancing, as boring as it sounds, ( requiring to shoot a 'calibration shot" with every change in lighting) is the only way to keep the chip under control. Those new cameras offer auto setting for daylight, tungsten,fluorescent,flash etc, devised to ease your life, but those "canned" settings have such a big range of color temperatures, you can't tell if you are really calibrating anything at all, and then the fight occurs in PS, when you could have none or just a little at all. It is the equivalent of having many different emulsions of the same film, and even some different films for the shooting, so some changes can be expected to happen in color rendering. Well, just the same. Auto White Balance can go from 5000k to 6600k and the camera makes the choice on a shot by shot basis. White balancing is like choosing the same film and emulsion for some specfic shooting. I suffered from this problem while reproducing some 120 Paintings for a catalog. Most of the images were shot on day 1 and 2 with my custom WB routine run before shooting. Days later I was in a frenzy ( in another asignment) and some few paintings were to just arrive and leave the studio in minutes. I set my lights, resembling the original set, went into AWB in the camera , did the shootings and the paintings were delivered back. Then , as things happen here on and on, the final layout of the catalog took longer than expected ( those graphic designers....), and then there was not a chance to make any corrections in the printing stage. Everything went straight on to litography and press. I did not have the slightest chance to get involved in the CMYK conversion and it was the GD himself ( not the press) who did it. When I saw the printed catalog, I was most impressed with the results, with the clear exception of those paintings shot on Auto WB. Absolutely no relationship at all with reality. I was able to stand on the Gallery, catalog in hand, checking one by one the results, and I could not believe how nice those calibrated images matched the paintings and how awful the other (Auto) group printed. With All things equal, I can only blame this on the WB miscalibration. Of course some post proc would have solved it, but it did not happen. A very basic, but useful set up for AWB and exposure , involving both a Kodak Grey Card and and white card can be seen at www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/dig-exp.shtml I have exchanged some e-mails with the guy who wrote it ,since I questioned his sequence,( he runs AWB first and then the grey card) and suggested to run first the Grey card to adjust exposure via the camera histogram, before shooting the white card . He agreed that it is more precise to go my way, but insisted that results may be the "almost" same in both cases( some people claim AWB can be set with the very same grey card anyway), but, as we are talking about fine tuning, it makes sense to be as strict as possible during pre- shooting, and having less trouble in post-processing. All the best. Jorge Parra APA/ASMP www.jorgeparra.com =============================================================== GO TO http://www.prodig.org for ~ GUIDELINES ~ un/SUBSCRIBING ~ ITEMS for SALE
