Luminous Landscape Forum
Equipment & Techniques => Medium Format / Film / Digital Backs – and Large Sensor Photography => Topic started by: ErikKaffehr on July 22, 2014, 07:56:13 am
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Hi,
I had some issues with colour on my P45+. As a background I am a long time Minolta/Sony user with most experience with Lightroom. I mosly use automatic white balance on the Sony, which is slighly coolish compared with white balance from a grey card. Auto white balance on the P45+ seems to be quite erratic, IMHO.
What I have found is that my P45+ conversions suddenly turned ut quite good, and I have found that depended on me setting a decent WB as a default. It is essentially a grey card based white balance. It works very well outdoors, as it keeps the characteristics of evening and morning light.
So I made a mistake, making me a much happier P45+ shooter.
The recepie is in short: Shot a grey card in good light, save it as default WB and use as a starting point. Live a happy life.
Best regards
Erik
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It has been my experience that setting proper white balance is a CRITICAL first step when processing my Phase IQ160 files. The IQ160 is very sensitive to color and even minor changes in WB affect the image quite a bit. With my Canon's it is not as critical since the Canons seem to "blend" slightly different colours more and while setting the proper WB is a good thing it is not as sensitive to minor changes. Why that is I have no idea.
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Hi,
I had some issues with colour on my P45+. As a background I am a long time Minolta/Sony user with most experience with Lightroom. I mosly use automatic white balance on the Sony, which is slighly coolish compared with white balance from a grey card. Auto white balance on the P45+ seems to be quite erratic, IMHO.
What I have found is that my P45+ conversions suddenly turned ut quite good, and I have found that depended on me setting a decent WB as a default. It is essentially a grey card based white balance. It works very well outdoors, as it keeps the characteristics of evening and morning light.
So I made a mistake, making me a much happier P45+ shooter.
The recepie is in short: Shot a grey card in good light, save it as default WB and use as a starting point. Live a happy life.
Best regards
Erik
You could take it a step further and have a saved: Early Morning WB/Late Morning WB/Early Afternoon WB/Late Afternoon WB. You could also have 4 sets of these - 1 set for each season, color balance changes during the year. But at that point, it may be easier to just pull your Xrite Passport out of your pocket.
Steve Hendrix
Capture Integration
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Steve,
Theoretically speaking WB and demosaic should commute. In maths jargon this means you can do either first, the other second, getting the same result. In practice they all too often don't.
Yes, the silly season has started. Welcome to the asylum summer party, run by the inmates for the inmates :)
Edmund
You could take it a step further and have a saved: Early Morning WB/Late Morning WB/Early Afternoon WB/Late Afternoon WB. You could also have 4 sets of these - 1 set for each season, color balance changes during the year. But at that point, it may be easier to just pull your Xrite Passport out of your pocket.
Steve Hendrix
Capture Integration
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It has been my experience that setting proper white balance is a CRITICAL first step when processing my Phase IQ160 files. The IQ160 is very sensitive to color and even minor changes in WB affect the image quite a bit. With my Canon's it is not as critical since the Canons seem to "blend" slightly different colours more and while setting the proper WB is a good thing it is not as sensitive to minor changes. Why that is I have no idea.
Ken R -- are you talking about getting white balance correct in camera, before you're ever on the computer? I was always under the impression that, with raw files, it made no difference whether you white-balanced in-camera or later, in raw processing. Is this incorrect? I often white balance in-camera, for more accurate viewing at the shoot, but I'd love to know if this makes a difference to the final files.
thanks
ethan
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Same experience with my Aptus II back, the 'flash' WB setting makes the colors look way better compared to the daylight WB setting. Took me a while to figure that out after resetting the back to factory default and seeing weird colors for no obvious reasons...
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Hi,
No, it doesn't work that way. For instance, at sunset there is mixed light. I would not use a WB for sunset, because that would be like daylight. When we used slide film there was daylight film, typically 5500 Kelvin and 3400 K incandescent. I would not use 3400 K film for sunsets, would you?
A small example, I shot a picture with my P45+ at night. With my accidental 5500 white balance it is stunningly beautiful. With the auto white balance of the P45+ I got something like 24000K, looks like crap. The Sony gives something like 7000K. So Sony looks good with automatic white balance and P45+ looks like crap. Using my daylight balanced profile Sony looks acceptable but looks P45+ magnificent.
So, what I found is that having a good white balance, based on old good sunlight, gives me a much better starting point than using AWB (Automatic White Balance) on the P45+.
I have tested the P45+ exposure on Capture One, and it was still crappy. I have not tested Capture One using a decent 5500K daylight colour balance, may be good. (Or I may have tested it and it was still crappy…)
Anyway, what I have found is that making a decent 5500 K greycard shot my starting point I get good colours, at least in LR 5. I don't know about Capture One. I have never made anything useful in that program, sorry. (Even if I find demosaic betterin C1 than in Lightroom).
Actually, I think I have a slight bias in favor of Minolta/Sony rendition in Lightroom. I have used those tools for 8-9 years, that is where I am coming from.
Anyway, this simple change makes me comfortable with my P45+ files, so it is a major step forward for me.
Best regards
Erik
You could take it a step further and have a saved: Early Morning WB/Late Morning WB/Early Afternoon WB/Late Afternoon WB. You could also have 4 sets of these - 1 set for each season, color balance changes during the year. But at that point, it may be easier to just pull your Xrite Passport out of your pocket.
Steve Hendrix
Capture Integration
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I have always made it a point to carry the x-rite color checker and shoot it in the field during a shoot. I then use the colorchecker in C1 to as a starting point for my grey / white balance. The nice thing about the color checker is all you need is the color it doesn't have to be in great focus. Zoom into the color checker and click on the grey sections.
You can do the the same in the dried as Steve and Erik and Ken. I have never really gotten the knack of that or when I get one it I don't like the look on the LCD.
I have operated with the assumption that with raw WB is arbitrary since it is a raw file and all value can be adjusted I in post. Having the color checker shot just makes it is much easier and faster to get a good starting point in C1
Paul
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Hi,
Thanks for good comments.
I have two observations, one is that daylight shot of the X-rite ColorChecker give normally almost identical colour balance. For instance I have some shots from early June at 2200 m in Italy and some from end of May at sea level in Sweden. Both very close. So it makes sense to me to have a daylight preset.
The other observation is that light is often mixed. In landscape shooting the sunlight is often around 5500K but shadows are often illuminated by skylight, say 9000K. At sunset light is still 9000 K in the shadows, but sunlight is shifted to say around 4000 K. This difference is really what makes sunset shot. Where would I put that CC? In the sunlight or in the very blue shadow? What I found is that the daylight shot of the colour checker card is a very good starting point.
Best regards
Erik
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I was recently out shooting with an acquaintance who uses an IQ 160.
He just uses his LCC as his grey card? (+2 stops exposure)
Do any of you use this method?
If not, why not or if so, why?
I'm interested in the benefits or not.
Cheers
Andrew
Typo edited for Steve...;-)
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I was recently out shooting with an acquaintance who uses an IQ 160.
He just uses his LLC as his grey card? (+2 stops exposure)
Do any of you use this method?
If not, why not or if so, why?
Hi Andrew,
No, because the world isn't neutral grey. I carry a WhiBal with me as a reference. In fact, the one I bought also came with a miniature version, which hangs from the side of my backpack. Always available.
Cheers,
Bart
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As a new MF user (<6 mo), and as someone who pretty much uses Kelvin settings on my Nikon 90+% of the time, I was surprised that of my older p25+ and new credo40 both lack Kelvin. I'm usually setting wb with a gray card, but I thought it funny that the camera has auto/daylight/etc. but no kelvin.
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Ken R -- are you talking about getting white balance correct in camera, before you're ever on the computer? I was always under the impression that, with raw files, it made no difference whether you white-balanced in-camera or later, in raw processing. Is this incorrect? I often white balance in-camera, for more accurate viewing at the shoot, but I'd love to know if this makes a difference to the final files.
thanks
ethan
No, i mentioned "...when processing..", means when on the computer adjusting the RAW files in Capture One. I rarely do WB in camera when using the phase. I might do it when I am working untethered and with a client watching and no access to a laptop. The RAW files stay the same regardless of the in camera WB setting so your assumption is correct.
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I was recently out shooting with an acquaintance who uses an IQ 160.
He just uses his LLC as his grey card? (+2 stops exposure)
Do any of you use this method?
If not, why not or if so, why?
I'm interested in the benefits or not.
i did this usually, when processing my hasselblad files in phocus. it worked very well - always gave natural colors.
but since i use lightroom as my main tool i can't do it this way, because the dng-flat-field-plugin doesn't let me set the wb on the lcc shot.
tried to ask eric chan if it would be possible for a future version, but never got an answer ;-(
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Erik... do you mean that you was wrong all this time about how worthless of the extra cost was P45+ over your Sony? ...have you advised all these readers wrong all this time? ...Imagine if using P45+ with LR proves to be a disaster in comparison of developing the images with C1P1... Imagine then...
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No,
I have found a better starting point for processing my P45+ images using, essentially by creating a 'daylight-preset', which I found works with many images.
This page is good info on my experience with the P45+: http://echophoto.dnsalias.net/ekr/index.php/photoarticles/80-my-mfd-journey-summing-up .
Just for your information, I have used Capture 1. It doesn't work for me. I have found some issues with LR where Capture One makes a better job, check here: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?topic=91785.0
This link also gives some interesting insight: http://www.getdpi.com/forum/590553-post7.html
Best regards
Erik
Erik... do you mean that you was wrong all this time about how worthless of the extra cost was P45+ over your Sony? ...have you advised all these readers wrong all this time? ...Imagine if using P45+ with LR proves to be a disaster in comparison of developing the images with C1P1... Imagine then...
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Hi,
LLC is intended for correction of lens colour cast. To use it for white balance it would be needed to be turned towards the light source. Shooting a grey card is much simpler. But, if a LLC is used is used as grey reference, you can just take a white balance on the LLC shot and copy to the real image.
AFAIK LLC only works with DNG-files in LR, this was the case I checked latest.
Best regards
Erik
i did this usually, when processing my hasselblad files in phocus. it worked very well - always gave natural colors.
but since i use lightroom as my main tool i can't do it this way, because the dng-flat-field-plugin doesn't let me set the wb on the lcc shot.
tried to ask eric chan if it would be possible for a future version, but never got an answer ;-(
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I understood, and therefore may be in error, that the LCC captured the colour cast produced by the lens at the settings used for that scene. The result will therefore, by definition, be coloured, it will not be neutral and will therefore not give an accurate white balance reading?
Supplementary question: White balance "pickers" select a small pixel sample. If using a grey target would a larger sample increase accuracy or is good enough good enough?
PS. On my P20 I shoot balanced to flash outdoors and find that the best starting point, often the finishing point as well.
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I understood, and therefore may be in error, that the LCC captured the colour cast produced by the lens at the settings used for that scene. The result will therefore, by definition, be coloured, it will not be neutral and will therefore not give an accurate white balance reading?
Supplementary question: White balance "pickers" select a small pixel sample. If using a grey target would a larger sample increase accuracy or is good enough good enough?
PS. On my P20 I shoot balanced to flash outdoors and find that the best starting point, often the finishing point as well.
I guess it's a three step process: first time you use the LCC to give the software information about color shading across the sensor. This the software internalises somewhere with a shading compensation file. Then you process the LCC image with itself as color shading compensation which should make it uniform, and then you decide which shade this "uniform white" should be, at which point you have a set of color multipliers which I guess is what a white balance is.
The problem as I see it is that there is now reason to assume that the LCC shot should be "white" or "grey". If I take an image of sea-sky through the LCC, it should be blue, of a forest, it should be green. The LCC shot consists of an average of light reflected from the scene, only if you make the grey world assumption does this relate directly to the illuminant. Of course, if you point the LCC plate at the sky and use it as an incident light meter then everything should work.
I'm trying to be helpful here, this ping pong process needs geek-type thinking, not photographic understanding.
All of this is just a guess; at this point I find digital photography is turning into incomprehensible alchemy a bit like chemical photography back in the days when.
Edmund
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First, it is LCC, not LLC! :D
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
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First, it is LCC, not LLC! :D
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
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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 :-)
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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
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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 :-)
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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
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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.
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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