A study in colour - Part 8 -White balance and skin tone

Small changes in tone/colour produce significant variations in skin tone.

Getting the right white balance is important when photographing people.  Small changes in white balance affect skin tones significantly.  There are two standard places where you can correct white balance:  In the camera directly or by editing the photo afterwards.  

Picking white balance in camera - your camera comes with a white balance control that is accessed from a button on the camera and/or through a menu.  When shooting jpeg or heif images, the best plan is to set the white balance first before shooting.  It is reasonably easy to do, although if you have never done it before it may take a bit of playing.  You can either white balance from a photo stored on the memory card or you can white balance directly at a scene by taking a photo.  

The trick here is to have something truly neutral.  It should be white, black, or grey, and have no hint of any shade of colour at all.  It needs to be large enough to fill the screen of the camera without the camera causing shade to fall upon it.  It also has to be in the same lighting as your subject.  If all these things are true, you should be good to go.  I often use a sheet of white paper.  An Expo Disc also works well and is simple enough to carry.

Picking white balance when editing - If you shoot raw images, you can do all of your white balancing in post.  The advantage here is that you don't have to play around in the field with white balance settings and you can generally nail it within a program like Photoshop.  I use the eyedropper tool in the Adobe Raw program to pick up the colour of something neutral.  I often use things that I know for sure have no colour tint with it.  This can be white socks, black straps, or some article of clothing.  It is a good idea to play with the settings a bit and look at the effect the selection has on skin colour.

You can always correct an image that is already saved as a jpeg after the fact, but it causes data loss, while raw or in-camera choices produce full data packets.  

Thanks for reading.

Eric Svendsen     www.ericspix.com