Continuity of colours.

gramps

gramps

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'Gramps'
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I enjoy my wildlife photography and think I have a reasonable post-processing procedure, however there is one area particularly that I regularly fail in and that is continuity of colour ... perhaps more specifically white balance. Working from different sites and in different light often produces different colours but additionally when taking a series of shots in the same location with perhaps different lighting I struggle to get continuity of colour/WB. For example today, taking photos of birds on a grass background came out pretty uniform in colour/WB but as soon as I shot against a background of bright water it was more challenging to get continuity with the colour/WB of the other photos on the grass.
I'm sure that my problem rests not so much in processing as getting the colour/WB right in camera.
I use Auto-WB so basically the camera setting for WB is always the same and I often find myself adjusting it in processing and it really doesn't always work right.
Really looking for any guidance of what I can do 1) in camera and 2) in processing to get colour/WB continuity (without having to carry loads of gizmo's around with me as my bag is already heavy enough!
Any help & advice would be appreciated. :)
 
No advice here, but the same problem for me even after years of taking picture the wb is the one thing that always get me stuck. I think i usually go a tad too warm as of personal preference. Basically does white as to be white? If it is a low winter sun clearly it is a very yellow light and i try to reproduce it in my picture. WB can make such a difference!
 
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Roger, see page 156… select WB A… that solved it for me.
 
Kodiak Qc said:
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Roger, see page 156… select WB A… that solved it for me.
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I've been using that Daniel but I still experience issues with the variations in light and conditions, I'm not sure any 'Auto' method is going to resolve it.
 
gramps said:
Yes, the 'Natural' option ... but it isn't foolproof.
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Foolproof? No, Roger, it can't be… by definition!

That is why I rely on my grey card for when ever I fell
colour changes throughout the day.

C1 in this regard is of great support but it too can't be
foolproof… by definition!
 
As a basic Idea. Auto WB is trying to resolve colours to a neutral grey but with some Algorithm tweaks. So background colour does influence the overall balance that is set
You are more likely to get a consistent set of photographs, by setting either a custom white balance, or by setting one of the pre-sets. and using it till there is a major change in the light.

The only real alternative is to visually match an object that appears in every shot, which can be anything you want to be a key colour through out the set.
You can of course use the Info tab in photoshop to measure the colour of anything in an image, which you can then adjust to match the same value in another image.

In reality a manual adjustment in PP to balance a set of photographs using the colour balance sliders in the Raw filter is as easy as any other way.
 
jerry12953 said:
I very rarely have a problem with white balance and hardly ever think about it! Always leave it on auto. Maybe it's a case of over-thinking it?

I hardly ever have to adjust it in PP but if I do I feel i have a good memory of what conditions were really like.
Click to expand...
I don't know if that's true for me, but I feel that, when making PP adjustments, one aims to make the image how you would have LIKED the conditions to have been, rather than how they actually were.
 
Most scenes don't really have a prominent colour in, and so AWB is pretty good at working out most scenes, but it can be fooled by a lot of a certain colour in a scene. If you have a sheet of white paper and sheet of off white paper, fill the viewfinder with each paper and take a pics of each with AWB. They should be very similar. If you take a pic of a bird against a sky, and then with a green grassy background, the camera could drastically change the colours.

If you want more consistency of WB then choose a preset appropriate for the lighting you / the subject, are in. In the previous example, if you chose say a Cloudy WB, then the colours shouldn't change too much if the actual lighting stays the same.

If you want accuracy take a custom WB, but that can be a pita in changing light. ;)

I choose a preset WB for the light I/the subject are under, and then alter to what looks 'right'. I always shoot in RAW as well so that I can change the colours with the least amount of impact on the quality of the image. I can also open a lot of images at the same time and adjust the WB all at once. Pics that were taken at the same time, and the lighting didn't change for example, but that all need the same tweak. You can also do that Jpegs of course, but with the RAW files I can choose a different preset WB after the fact, which you can't do with the JPegs.
 
redhed17 said:
I can also open a lot of images at the same time and adjust the WB all at once. Pics that were taken at the same time, and the lighting didn't change for example, but that all need the same tweak.
Click to expand...

Other than Custom WB that sounds like the most sensible option. :)
 
Not suggesting rushing out and buying Capture One, but today's new release offers a "colour normalise" feature to help maintain consistency of colour balance across images.

A video review is here
 
Kodiak Qc said:
A most unfortunate choice of "ambassador"
the way I see it! :eek::jawdrop::confused:
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He does take a bit of getting used. I've watched a couple of his webinars and leant things, but he isn't a natural presented/teacher.
 
myotis said:
new release offers a "colour normalise" feature
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The newly released "colour normalise" feature is nonsensical if you
ask me. When CO 11 came out with the "new trash" feature, I felt
the same about it: there are now three ways to trash stuff and it is 2
ways too many… in my book!

CO is really the best thing around but why do they keep shooting
bullets in their own feet?
 
Kodiak Qc said:
The newly released "colour normalise" feature is nonsensical if you
ask me.
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Without thinking about it too deeply yet, I thought the idea looked useful. Pick a key colour in image 1, and then align the same colour in the other images to this key colour. Maybe I just haven't thought about it enough.
 
myotis said:
I thought the idea looked useful
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Well, it is not because it did the same thing better before:
applying the tweak to an area and not to the whole image!
 
Kodiak Qc said:
Well, it is not because it did the same thing better before:
applying the tweak to an area and not to the whole image!
Click to expand...

But isn't applying it to the whole image the whole point of it, so you can quickly have a uniformity of colour multiple images. There is nothing to stop you tweaking areas as you have always been able to do, but wasn't uniformity across multiple images the purpose of the OP.

Maybe I should wait until I try it :)

Edit: or do you mean because it was already there under the skin tone tab, rather than presented as a more general tool
 
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myotis said:
There is nothing to stop you tweaking areas as you have always been able to do
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Right, but now it must be through a layer-
myotis said:
but wasn't uniformity across multiple images the purpose of the OP.
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The copy /paste adjustments was already doing that!
myotis said:
Maybe I should wait until I try it
Click to expand...

Or, as it will cost you nothing, it may well be the better
way to evaluate it and see for yourself, Graham. :cool:
 
Kodiak Qc said:
The copy /paste adjustments was already doing that!
Click to expand...

Ah, OK, this is where I struggle to get my head around this, but I thought the point was this was "not" the same as copy and paste, as it will make a "different" adjustments to each image to make them all look the same i.e. every image has a different starting point.

Where as copy and paste is applying the "same" adjustments to multiple images that all need the same adjustments as the first image because they all have the same starting point.
 
Kodiak Qc said:
Yes but they should all arrive at the same point! :cool:
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OK. I'll come back when I have had a proper look, as I thought this was exactly what the normalise feature was trying to do, and that was why it was different from copy and paste, where you would end up at a different point on every image you pasted the settings to.

Or maybe I misunderstand how paste works, I have assumed that if you copy a +10 exposure, then you will paste the same +10 exposure to every picture you paste the adjustment to, regardless of of how light or dark the "pasted to" images are.
 
Brian G said:
I don't know if that's true for me, but I feel that, when making PP adjustments, one aims to make the image how you would have LIKED the conditions to have been, rather than how they actually were.
Click to expand...


As a general comment I find that Auto WB tends to fail for me when there is a very strong colour "imbalance" across the image, for example at sunset; I find that it is then necessary to compensate for it by warming the image, sometimes quite considerably.
 
jerry12953 said:
As a general comment I find that Auto WB tends to fail for me when there is a very strong colour "imbalance" across the image, for example at sunset; I find that it is then necessary to compensate for it by warming the image, sometimes quite considerably.
Click to expand...
I have found AWB can take a lot of the colour out of a sunset too. Some say use Cloudy or Shade WB for warm sunsets.
 
jerry12953 said:
Or adjust it in pp......
Click to expand...
As well as. ;) If it is a RAW file you're adjusting then a lot to play with, but the amount of colour AWB can take away, with a JPEG, then you may quickly get some artefacts making such a big colour changes.

I always try to get it as accurate as possible in camera, as that is 'good practice', and may reduce editing time later. :) It is easier to add the artistic touches than to make it accurate after the fact imho. ;)
 
Kodiak Qc said:
Yes but they should all arrive at the same point! :cool:
Click to expand...
Having now had a play with this, and read a bit more, it does seem to work as I thought. But I found it tricky to get it to work,

If you copy and paste corrections you are pasting the same corrections to multiple images, which have all been taken under the same conditions.

But with the normalisation tool, you are pasting a different correction to multiple images, which have all been taken under different conditions so that each image will matche (in terms of colour balance and exposure) the original image.

One review said that it worked like having a grey card in every image, but being able to work with any colour.

Is this what you thought it did and thought was already being done by existing tools?
 
As a non-CO user, working with Lightroom instead, I often manually set colour temperature to where I would expect it to be IF it needs adjusting. Clear skies outside golden hours? 5200K. Golden hour? 6350k etc. Much of the time the camera gets it right, but sometimes it doesn't and then a little tweak towards expectations is usually enough.
 
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