Probably most of you sooner or later will get into point where colors of your photos look weird. Probably you've already read some ideas about how to make it correct. I will not try to explain how it works and why (again - plenty of usefull information in the web) - I will just focus on some less known ideas how to fix it.
1. Grey Card.
Well it's most common way of solving problem. You just have to shoot a first photo with an object that is 18% grey (usually a special grey card, white paper might work too), on a non-auto white balance mode with proper exposition (this object cannot be black or completly white on photo) . Then you shoot all session on same temperature setting. In post-process just take first photo with grey card on it and using proper tool in most of the graphic programs set white balance by clicking on the area on grey card. Then difference between a normal and corrected photo needs to be applied to all photos from session and... wuala! There is of course little problems if your session takes a bit longer outdoors (where sun position changes constantly affecting temperature), or if a light condition change (for example moving from indoor to outdoor, etc.). If you shoot in JPG not in RAW, there might be some cases where you could not fix colors so in that case I would suggest to use:
2. Grey Card and Custom White Balance.
This is almost identical to a 1. point, except that you use a built in camera setting that says "from now on use a white balance from this picture". Probably you would need to take look into a camera manual that says how this WB is accuired and used. For example in Canon 50D when you take a look trough viewfinder there is a circle in a middle - you need to make sure that object you shoot is completly covered by that circle. When you set a custom white balance, from now on all images should have more or less correct colors. This way your JPG-s should have proper color out of camera and slight temperature changes will still be possible.
3. No Grey Card. Before photo is done.
There are few modes in camera that could help decide about white balance. However I would advice in that case to shoot in RAW-s, as in that case you will have much more information about color that you can get out of photo in post-process. Anyway if you still want to shoot in JPG, automatic mode still should give you quite good option. Keep in mind that if you can select any other mode than automatic and have more or less good results then in post-process you can apply white balance difference from one shoot to all of them. When you use automatic WB it be different each time you make a photo.
4. No Grey Card. After photo is done.
There are cases where you don't have proper WB on your shoots. What options do you have? Well its not yet lost completly, however its not as simple. For sure having calibrated monitor helps decide what looks correct, but its still doable to a certain level:
- Is there a human on photo? We see people everyday so in seconds we can say that something is wrong with photo (even if not exactly sure what). My trick here is to have at least few reference photo that you can open next to your photo that you know that skin there looks correct. By changing temperature of you image you can find something in the middle that might look like correct skin tone. You could always check by color picker what are relations of Red, Green and Blue values of a skin - for white skin usually it's good if distance between red and green is similar to distance between green and blue, and they are in relation R > G > B (red highest, blue lowest).
- Is there something white on the photo? Just use this as reference! The problem with this method is... well are you sure that its white? Not a cream, or little pinkish? Anyway still worth to give it a try. Use then a white balance tool, or change temperature to a level where this white area's RGB values are the same.
- Do you remember taking photo? If you have good calibrated monitor then you might be able to reproduce scene "from your mind". Tricky but possible.
- Recently I use a technique with quite good results - together with reference photo, set additional layer with vibrance and saturation to maximum, try to balance that photo and then remove vibrance layer. This way even very small change of color you can see immediately during transforms.
In all of those cases I follow one rule. Get back to the image after post-proces after a while. Colors that you change might look ok when editing, but eyes have nice (but not in this case) adaptation mechanism that will change temporarily your feeling of a correct color balance.
5. Light sources with different temperatures.
This one is pretty hard to fix. It requires some more manual work on a photo, but results are quite often much more appealing that you would guess. Most of the time this problem appears during a shoots with strobe and natural light (daylight?) - if you don't use a strobe gel, then areas that are hit by strobe light will have different temperature. In that case I advice to first set temperature to one of light (usually daylight), then create a separate color balance layer with mask and paint regions where color is different than should. Bit of practice will help you understand the concept.
Let me know if you know any better methods, as I found quite many on the web, but those are the one that works for me most of the time. I'm also interested how you're doing your WB setting, please share with us!
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