white balancing act

Our friends over at PhotoWalkPro have put together a very nice blogpost about White Balance that you can find here . If you use Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom (basically the same processing engine) you can easily adjust your white balance after the fact, whether you shoot in jpg or raw. RAW will always give you a greater margin of error, however.

However, it will save you some time and guesswork if you set it correctly to begin with. A truly white object will be helpful, or an 18% grey card, or the slightly warming grey that is mentioned in the linked post. You can also use devices like the expodisc.

The most important thing to remember is to try to avoid a situation where your subject is under lights of different temperatures. An incandescent light coming from one angle, some flourescent off this other way, maybe some natural daylight sneaking in a window. Try to limit your lighting to just one kind or match the temperatures if you can in order to achieve true colors in post.

Of course, completely whacked out color can be fun, too. That's why they invented cross-processing. But I advise you generally go for accurate color early and allow yourself more options later.