Balancing colour temp in studio settings

K

kd87

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Katie
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Hi everyone,

I was wondering if you could give me some advice. I recently shot a prom - a simple set up in the location, light grey back wall, I had a continuous soft box either side and shot on fuji xe2 on auto white balance. When I came to post editing I balanced all the skin tones - a lot of orange girls - and individually they all look fine when returned - I had them printed in gloss - however there is a obvious difference of the background colour when they are all together. From blue to grey. I am just wondering how others work with balancing different skin tones in same settings.

Many thanks,

K
 
In fixed studio lighting I use a set WB either flash or a custom setting. Auto will tend to pick up on the colours of the dresses/orange skin etc and average it out giving you different colours shot to shot (some cameras do a better job than others of guessing)
 
Something I've started doing was to turn off auto white balance. It doesn't really bother me what it's set to, just not auto as it will then not change from shot to shot. You can then do simple batch changes for colour balance. You can of course use a colour checker if there is a requirement for accuracy at the start, however I'd guess that in this case there is not such a requirement?
 
Thank you. I will try out shooting off auto and use a colour checker in future, I have always relied on auto but feel I have to edit each images individually so batch processing would be good for speed.
 
While I normally set my White Balance to Auto, I try to remember to set it to flash for studio shooting. I also use a colour checker passport for each of the lighting set-ups if the colour is critical. I only take Raw so changing the WB later is not a big issue anyway. If you have a grey background (or better still a shot of the colour checker) it is easy to establish the WB. If using LR, it is then easy to synchronise settings and set the WB the same for all the other images in that shoot.

Dave
 
If you're shooting RAW can you not simply set the same colour temperature & tint for all images? Skin tones will vary, but that's only natural.
 
Use a custom white balance with a grey card. The inside of some camera backpacks are the right colour grey. Photograph that as a complete grey image then scroll through your camera menu to custom white balance, where it asks you to select an image to use. Select that, then set your white balance to Custom
 
1. Don't use auto white balance.
2. Don't use continuous lighting, use flash.

(Studio) flash has enough power to overwhelm the ambient light and the colour temperature problems that it creates, continuous lighting doesn't.
 
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