Color balancing and white balance for color-blinds

[FB101]

This will come across as a weird request but I am Red/Green and Blue/Green colorblind - over the years I have learnt to adjust my photography to this fact and I do convert to b&w shots with tricky lighting conditions because there is no way I can fix them. I have also learnt to use the pipette in LR and I have gotten quite good at matching RGB readings to what my wife tells me things “look like” to avoid major debacles.

That said, are there any tricks, tools, methods folks know about and can help with my reality? Now an then I still get the odd comment that “colors look really weird in this shot” and it’s usually because my safeguards failed and I did something funky. I am envious of those folks who just look at a shot and say “just needs 3 points of magenta added in the shadows...” I am lucky when I am not 20 points off.

i did try and ask birds in flight to hold grey cards for me but so far they have been less than cooperative (lions seemed more open to the idea but they might have something nefarious in mind) so I am willing to consider any ideas you all may have on how to get WB and color balance right.

 

[jeffnles1]

Following this thread. I don't have anything to add but am really interested in the answers. It's a question I've not seen come up on the forums before but one I'm sure a lot of folks wonder about.

 

[bleirer]

Get a color checker passport photo 2. It is a card with carefully produced standard color and gray patches. You photograph the card then the software it comes with automatically makes a profile to use in lightroom and Photoshop that will give standard colors in your photograph. It also has a precice neutral patch for white balance for in camera white balance if you prefer that. There is a feature where you shoot under two different light conditions and it turns both into one generic profile that can be used with that camera for any light conditions. Also it has patches that allow slight warming or cooling of white balance.

P.S. there is a color blind mode in Photoshop, I've never tried it but might be worth googling.

 

[FB101]

Get a color checker passport photo 2. It is a card with carefully produced standard color and gray patches. You photograph the card then the software it comes with automatically makes a profile to use in lightroom and Photoshop that will give standard colors in your photograph. It also has a precice neutral patch for white balance for in camera white balance if you prefer that. There is a feature where you shoot under two different light conditions and it turns both into one generic profile that can be used with that camera for any light conditions. Also it has patches that allow slight warming or cooling of white balance.

P.S. there is a color blind mode in Photoshop, I've never tried it but might be worth googling.

Thanks for the tips, I will check color checker passport - I have alway dismissed those types of tools as being for studio only but I'll check that one and see if it can serve my needs. I did look into the colorblind mode in photoshop but it is actually designed to help designers without color vision issues assess what designs will look like for various types of colorblindness and provide variants that are more easily seen by people with my kind of issues (I can't tell you the number of times when marketing-communications agencies have given me pitches I can't read... and i've had to educate them on colorblindness).

 

[bleirer]

Thanks for the tips, I will check color checker passport - I have alway dismissed those types of tools as being for studio only but I'll check that one and see if it can serve my needs. I did look into the colorblind mode in photoshop but it is actually designed to help designers without color vision issues assess what designs will look like for various types of colorblindness and provide variants that are more easily seen by people with my kind of issues (I can't tell you the number of times when marketing-communications agencies have given me pitches I can't read... and i've had to educate them on colorblindness).

I did not know that about the photoshop proofing, good to know.

If you have a raw workflow in Lightroom/Photoshop it is pretty easy to integrate the passport. Pros might make a different profile for every lighting situation and every lens/camera combination, but for your purposes it might be fine to use what they call a dual illuminant profile. You take two correctly exposed images shot in raw under two different lighting conditions. There is a lightroom plugin for the passport, you just select the two images and export to colorchecker. Restart lightroom and there it will be in your profiles section under 'browse'. You choose that instead of adobe color or whatever and mark it as a favorite so now it will come up in the main dropdown. The colors are now standardized. Use the eyedropper to get pick up the white balance off one of the neutral patches and you are good to go. As long as you don't make further color adjustments you can be confident the color of things in the picture will match the color it is in the real world.

 

[Andrew Lamberson]

I don't mean to be a smart aleck or insensitive, but have you considered being THE guy for black and white images? There was a pretty famous landscape photographer that specialized in that! It would be interesting to see what someone that really understood the art of black and white could do in nature photography! I had a buddy that was an amazing black and white, pencil artist and his work was really striking!

 

[DRwyoming]

I am willing to consider any ideas you all may have on how to get WB and color balance right.

I'd recommend trying to find a copy of this book by Dan Margulis that talks in depth about color corrections and expectations of 'correct color' in RGB and CMYK color spaces. He talks about training pre-press color correction professionals that were color blind but learned over time to color adjust by the numbers. He includes information on what you might expect for typical things like flesh tones and some common scenes: http://www.moderncolorworkflow.com

The only real hint I have is to look for anything grayscale in your image. That doesn't have to be a gray card but can be any object that's naturally on the white to black continuum. That could be a gray perch of old dried wood, a black snout or beak or something like well lit white snow (shaded snow will tend to have a bit of blue cast which is also a useful reference point). Even the white feathers on some birds can be a good reference point for obtaining neutral color balance.

The trick of course is that neutral color balance isn't always the goal and generally isn't really the goal when shooting in golden hour light. But getting colors to neutral is a good starting point from which you can warm things up a bit if desired (e.g. add shift Temp towards yellow and Tint a bit towards magenta to warm a neutral image). How much is a matter of taste and probably the toughest thing to do well by the numbers but it's surprising how many nature images have something that can be used as a neutral or near neutral reference.

The more you learn about color theory and lighting including things like why images captured in shadows will be lit with scattered bluish light will help a ton in terms of knowing what to expect and where you might look for a good lighting reference in your images.

 

[FB101]

I did not know that about the photoshop proofing, good to know.

If you have a raw workflow in Lightroom/Photoshop it is pretty easy to integrate the passport. Pros might make a different profile for every lighting situation and every lens/camera combination, but for your purposes it might be fine to use what they call a dual illuminant profile. You take two correctly exposed images shot in raw under two different lighting conditions. There is a lightroom plugin for the passport, you just select the two images and export to colorchecker. Restart lightroom and there it will be in your profiles section under 'browse'. You choose that instead of adobe color or whatever and mark it as a favorite so now it will come up in the main dropdown. The colors are now standardized. Use the eyedropper to get pick up the white balance off one of the neutral patches and you are good to go. As long as you don't make further color adjustments you can be confident the color of things in the picture will match the color it is in the real world.

Thank you so much, your explanation matches what I found this afternoon as I was researching it but yours is much clearer I will give it a try - even if not foolproof, at least it will get me closer most of the time. Highly appreciated.

 

[FB101]

I don't mean to be a smart aleck or insensitive, but have you considered being THE guy for black and white images? There was a pretty famous landscape photographer that specialized in that! It would be interesting to see what someone that really understood the art of black and white could do in nature photography! I had a buddy that was an amazing black and white, pencil artist and his work was really striking!

i do quite a bit in B&W for sure. Usually we’ll received by people who are not wildlife “purists” but not as much by folks who are more interested in accurately capturing the appearance of the animals - it does make sense, I don’t say that in a derogatory way, it’s about priorities.

 

[bleirer]

Thank you so much, your explanation matches what I found this afternoon as I was researching it but yours is much clearer I will give it a try - even if not foolproof, at least it will get me closer most of the time. Highly appreciated.

Best of luck with it.

 

[FB101]

As mentioned, i do a lot of B&W conversions butit's not easy to get the full effect right

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[Andrew Lamberson]

Those are great! I am actually working on a series of B&W for a display in my Den. It's NOT as easy as it would seem!

 

[Andrew Lamberson]

Your Chick-a-dee picture really shows the eyes well. Much better than a color image. I'm going to work on one of my pics of a chick-a-dee

 

[dabhand16]

This will come across as a weird request but I am Red/Green and Blue/Green colorblind - over the years I have learnt to adjust my photography to this fact and I do convert to b&w shots with tricky lighting conditions because there is no way I can fix them. I have also learnt to use the pipette in LR and I have gotten quite good at matching RGB readings to what my wife tells me things “look like” to avoid major debacles.

I'm a bit R/G colour blind too (AFAIK most men are to some extent) and back in the day I could not do wet colour processing. It also inhibited me from doing portraits and is probably the reason I love black & white.

One issue I had doing mono conversions in PS with the channel mixer was that they had a cyan cast - that only others could see! To get round that I use NIK Collection Silver FX to get a clean mono starting point as a PS plug-in. I also use, as others have said, the Colorchecker passport 2 which is dead easy to use with LR (and now Capture One) and I've created several profiles for all of my cameras to match the time of year light - sun/bright cloudy/ overcast for Winter and Summer. I'm now confident that my colours are correct.

 

[FB101]

I'm a bit R/G colour blind too (AFAIK most men are to some extent) and back in the day I could not do wet colour processing. It also inhibited me from doing portraits and is probably the reason I love black & white.

One issue I had doing mono conversions in PS with the channel mixer was that they had a cyan cast - that only others could see! To get round that I use NIK Collection Silver FX to get a clean mono starting point as a PS plug-in. I also use, as others have said, the Colorchecker passport 2 which is dead easy to use with LR (and now Capture One) and I've created several profiles for all of my cameras to match the time of year light - sun/bright cloudy/ overcast for Winter and Summer. I'm now confident that my colours are correct.

I am a big fan of Silver FX and that's usually my first step in my B&W conversion workflow before fine-tuning the zones in photoshop.
Since everybody with similar issues as I swear by color checker passport, I know what I am trying next - thanks for all the great advice.

 

[FB101]

I've ordered the ClorChecker passport 2 and it will be here on Saturday so we'll see how it goes

 

[dabhand16]

I don't think you will regret it. I've found that it does not intrude into my workflow at all as you only need to apply the profiles you have generated for your camera(s) once in Lightroom per folder of images unless you have more than one lighting condition in the folder where you can select the ones you want to apply a different profile to.

The difference between my profiles and the Adobe standard profile is pronounced when I switched from one to the other and back.