A nice mistake with my P45+

[eronald]

First, it is LCC, not LLC! 

I don't really see the challenge of white balancing and whether using an LCC as a white balance card makes sense. Am I oversimplifying this? I don't know. But the LCC itself is not spectrally neutral, so can it work as a white balance tool, yes, but to a degree, the same that your macbook pro or some copy paper might work. It's usually at least better than a scene default white balance in terms of a starting point (certainly for digital backs). And yes you can click on an area of the LCC that is not impacted (or at least is minimally impacted) by the color cast, which is usually restricted more to one side.

But why would it not be just as easy to have an Xrite Passport or a WhiBal in your pocket to set white balance?


Steve Hendrix
Capture Integration

Actually, an LCC pointed at the sky sounds like a very good idea for outdoors shots.
Problem with Passport is that it will pick up a lot from the scene; you want to measure the illuminant, and Passport is a profiling aid turned into a white balance tool, and that is good but not completely not ideal. The issue is also whether you want your image to render the "color" of the object, or the perception which people in that scene would have of the color of that object. In one case you want to factor in the scene reflections, in the other probably not. Or yes. Try taking a picture of a model in vegetation, she ends up having green skin ... is that what you want, or not? 

Edmund

[torger]

When it comes to white balancing landscape photography I think a colorchecker is next to useless.

The concept of a colorchecker is to make colors look the same under any light. But in landscape photography you often shoot in extreme light (sunset, dusk etc) for which the eye/brain does not fully compensate for. Daylight white balance and profile will often give a more natural look for evening shoots than some special made evening profile.

Scenes with snow and late light here in the north is a very clear example of this. You can't just white balance for the snow or something, because it does not look white in that extreme light.

The best solution I've come across is to be a lot in nature, get a feeling for the light and colors, use a calibrated screen, use a daylight profile, and pull the temperature and tint sliders manually until it looks good and natural according to your own color memory and judgement. Actually, leaving at the default daylight white balance often leads to a good result. There are no tools available to make something "accurate", ie same as the eye/brain experience the colors at the scene, in these light conditions.

Color checker workflows are for 5000K type of color temperatures.

White balance from LCC shot I've tried briefly, haven't been able to produce sane results with it. It has the same problem... in extreme light white is not really experienced as white, and it's also a bit subject dependent.

Attached and example, late light in Abisko in January, tuned manually to replicate the eye's experience at the scene. Colorchecker or LCC shot would make no use there, other than showing that the light temperature is far out of bounds :-)

[Steve Hendrix]

When it comes to white balancing landscape photography I think a colorchecker is next to useless.

The concept of a colorchecker is to make colors look the same under any light. But in landscape photography you often shoot in extreme light (sunset, dusk etc) for which the eye/brain does not fully compensate for. Daylight white balance and profile will often give a more natural look for evening shoots than some special made evening profile.

Scenes with snow and late light here in the north is a very clear example of this. You can't just white balance for the snow or something, because it does not look white in that extreme light.

The best solution I've come across is to be a lot in nature, get a feeling for the light and colors, use a calibrated screen, use a daylight profile, and pull the temperature and tint sliders manually until it looks good and natural according to your own color memory and judgement. There are no tools available to make something "accurate", ie same as the eye/brain experience the colors at the scene, in these light conditions.

Color checker workflows are for 5000K type of color temperatures.

White balance from LCC shot I've tried briefly, haven't been able to produce sane results with it. It has the same problem... in extreme light white is not really experienced as white, and it's also a bit subject dependent.

Attached and example, late light in Abisko in January, tuned manually to replicate the eye's experience at the scene. Colorchecker or LCC shot would make no use there, other than showing that the light temperature is far out of bounds :-)

Yes, that is a limitation - that's why an in camera Kelvin tool may be a nice feature to have. I've tried the tint-steps of the Passport, which sometimes work ok. And Edmund, yes that's a good point about incidence vs reflectance. Ultimately I rarely get color right in camera and end up tweaking anyway, per Torger's method for the most part. But since I do that, I like having a consistent neutral starting point, regardless of the actual color temperature - personally, it helps me edit later as starting point.


Steve Hendrix
Capture Integration

[ErikKaffehr]

Hi,

I essentially agree with Anders Torger.

The way I used the ColorChecker  was essentially to create a good daylight reference and use it as a default. So this gives me a good starting point that is neither to yellow or to magenta. If it doesn't work, I tweak it, but it seems to me it is a better startting point than either using:

- Camera white balance "As Shot"
- Auto white balance
- Trying to find something neutral

The result for me is mostly that the grass is greener (less yellow) and sky is less magenta.

Best regards
Erik

When it comes to white balancing landscape photography I think a colorchecker is next to useless.

The concept of a colorchecker is to make colors look the same under any light. But in landscape photography you often shoot in extreme light (sunset, dusk etc) for which the eye/brain does not fully compensate for. Daylight white balance and profile will often give a more natural look for evening shoots than some special made evening profile.

Scenes with snow and late light here in the north is a very clear example of this. You can't just white balance for the snow or something, because it does not look white in that extreme light.

The best solution I've come across is to be a lot in nature, get a feeling for the light and colors, use a calibrated screen, use a daylight profile, and pull the temperature and tint sliders manually until it looks good and natural according to your own color memory and judgement. Actually, leaving at the default daylight white balance often leads to a good result. There are no tools available to make something "accurate", ie same as the eye/brain experience the colors at the scene, in these light conditions.

Color checker workflows are for 5000K type of color temperatures.

White balance from LCC shot I've tried briefly, haven't been able to produce sane results with it. It has the same problem... in extreme light white is not really experienced as white, and it's also a bit subject dependent.

Attached and example, late light in Abisko in January, tuned manually to replicate the eye's experience at the scene. Colorchecker or LCC shot would make no use there, other than showing that the light temperature is far out of bounds :-)

[Paul2660]

With the colorchecker, I feel I use it as a reference also.  It's just nice to have the shot as a point in time to start the WB process.  If the day gets darker or I work into a shady situation, I of course shoot another shot.  I most often will be tweaking the final WB in C1 many times to get where I want the final shot to be.  Sure would love to see C1 allow WB adjustments in adjustment layers, like LR allows with the adjustment brush.   Most times I feel the colorchecker shot in bright daylight is a bit warm anyway.   I always capture the raw with the "daylight" WB setting. 

As for the LCC's, I have found it helps to WB the processed LCC.  This is after C1 has processed the LCC.  It's rare that a LCC comes back with a neutral grey color, as sunsets will tend to give a yellow amber coloring and LCC"s in low light tend to have a bluer hue.  Once the LCC is processed, I will click on it with the WB tool and then use that WB as a starting point in C1.  This also seems to give me a better starting WB. 

As a landscape shooter, the WB is to me what I want it to be, as it's my memory of the scene that I am working to create a photograph of.  If working with a situation where I must attempt to get a realistic representation of the actual color so&metimes the colorchecker helps quite a bit.  I have run into this with architecture and car & airplane shoots.  Most times the owner has a preset idea of the color and to me it's critical to be able to recreate it. 

Paul

[torger]

I might start using colorchecker more in my landscape work, as a reference as it seems many of you have success with it. It is true when I get back to a shot I made a long time ago I may not have that color memory left. Maybe a colorchecker reference would help, to just see how it relates to the scene, even if it cannot be used as-is to set the white balance.

I've played with the idea to try to make some tool or workflow that can bring out more "true to the eye" colors in various landscape light. The interest in that would probably be quite weak though, realism is not exactly what you see in popular landscape photography. Not sure it's possible to make something more accurate than the manual from-memory method either. There are just too many parameters.

To me realism is achieved by having contrast and saturation as close to the visual memory as possible, not too much, not too little. I think the exact tint is less important. In popular landscape photography contrast and saturation is almost always exaggerated greatly of course. I have nothing against others doing that but I try to avoid that style personally -- it gives me more satisfaction to be out and shoot in great light conditions if my pictures then end up greater through the actual shooting conditions rather than me pulling sliders farther. But then again as an amateur I don't have any pressure on me to produce great pictures every time. As a pro I would probably use more tricks.

If I shoot with the tripod in the same place but camera pointed in different directions the ambient light can differ greatly just because of the different mix of filtered air light and direct (possibly cloud filtered) sunlight, on site the brain evens out the difference so you don't think about it much, but when looking at the photos it seems like the light was vastly different. In these situations I often equalize the white balance so the light seems to be the same, especially if the photograhs is to be presented side by side. This could be said to be less "accurate", but will look more natural to the viewer.

[alatreille]

Hi all,

Each method seems to make sense depending on each persons workflow and shooting typology.

Yes my mate would shoot his LCC, then in C1 apply the cast to the raw then use the LCC to create a WB which would then be applied to the raw.  This seemed to make sense for the majority of what we were shooting, which was mixed lighting situations, thus you are reading the total sum of the mixed light as directed to the sensor.

I think next time I'm out, we might run a test using the LCC and a Grey card and see how far of they vary.  If anyone could do this sooner than me (a month or so), I'm sure many would be interested in the comparison.

Cheers
Andrew