Improving Your Images Step 1: Adjusting the white colour balance (WB)

In the last blog we decided to turn off the camera's control and shoot in raw instead.
If you have used a  piece of software, such as Adobe's Photoshop or Lightroom, you will notice a few things, such as large files and the image looks poor in terms of colour. That is normal, as we will be adding the magic colour ingredient.

We will start by adjusting the white colour balance (WB) of an image. Some reasons why we need to adjust the WB include:

1. When shooting outside, the sun has a different colour (and hence light has a different temperature) at different times of the day ranging from warm orange, to yellow, to cool blue. If you have ever played with your camera and noticed "K" when adjusting colour it stands for "Kelvin" and refers to the temperature of the light. The warmer the light present, the higher the Kelvin we dial in. 
2. When shooting inside artificial light emits a different colour, whether it is fluorescent, incandescent, halogen or a mixture of these and light coming in through a window.

These situations where different colour light is present (green, purple, blue, yellow) affects the colour of those images illuminated, so we simply want to adjust the white balance in the image (ie set what is suppose to be white to white) to ensure the different components look the way they are suppose to. 


It looks easier than it is to read about ... so let us get to it.

Here is a raw image I will be using to show how to clean up an image. You will see that is has dead pixels, the colour is not very appealing and it is too dark in some places. The first order of business is to set the WB. To do this, open it in photoshop - I use CS6 (from Adobe's creative cloud).

Before we start, we will work in 16-bit/channel (which uses 256 times more data than 8-bit and we need all the information possible to play with images).

To change to 16-bit, click on the link found at the very bottom of the image, the in the depth field, choose 16 bits/channel.












To adjust the WB we click on the 3rd icon at the top menu bar and then choose a point in the scene to set to white. Play around with using different parts of the image and you will see different colour spaces used to colour the image.

Now by selecting different points in the image, a different colour profile is applied to the image. Choose a point that renders the image close to what it looked like. Or if you so choose, alter the colour profile to give the image a cooler or warmer feel.

In the next blog, we will look at tweaking our chosen image to bring out the shadows and a couple of subtle tweaks.



have fun! ☺

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