in this video,
I'll show you the three simple steps
I use to keep my colors consistent.
Hello I'm Gavin Hoey
and you're watching AdoramaTV
brought to you by Adorama,
the camera store that's got everything
for us photographers
and in this video,
I'm going to share my three quick steps
for getting color consistency
in your photography workflow.
Now you might think that means
we're going to go and take pictures
and talk about cameras.
We'll get to that in a little bit
but in fact step one of good color management
starts right here inside of my small home office
and it begins with a great monitor
because if you've got a bad monitor,
you'll get no consistency.
It makes it really hard
and a good monitor makes life a lot easier.
Now you want a monitor
that will show you at least 100 percent
of the SRGB color space.
That's the smallest one
photographers tend to use
and is usually absolutely fine
but if you're a serious photographer
get something like this BenQ SW2700
that shows me 99%
of the Adobe RGB color space
which is much bigger.
Now if you want to find out more
about color space
check out the Adorama Learning Center
but whatever monitor you get,
you're not done there.
You need to calibrate it.
That means you get the very
best out of the monitor.
Now every month or there about's,
I'll get myself this.
This is little XRite i1 colorimeter
and I'll pop it on the screen
and it will go through a series
of color management steps
to refine the color
and get the very best out of this monitor.
It does take a few minutes
to go through so the best thing to do,
is to let the monitor warm up,
start this running
and then you can go off
and take some photos,
which is exactly what I'm going to do
right now.
Step two of my color process
is getting the colors right in camera.
Now for this to work
I need to take some pictures
and to help me out with that,
I got the amazing Beth!
Beth's going to be the model
and as you can see,
she's wearing something bright blue
and the background,
we're going to put some color on there as well,
because I have a light behind Beth
with a gel in it.
Getting my colors right in camera
means I'm going to set
a custom white balance
and to do that
I need my color checker passport.
So let's grab that
and I'll open it up onto the gray side,
so this is the side
I'm going to use
and I need to put this in the same light
that's lighting my model,
so Beth can you hold that for me?
Thank you very much.
Making sure that Beth doesn't put her fingers
across the gray area,
all I need to do is take a photograph of that.
Now the process varies from camera to camera
for my Olympus camera
it's really simple.
I simply press and hold
he OneTouch white balance button,
fill the frame with the gray card
and take a shot.
I'm then ask to set a custom white balance,
I'll choose the default setting
and that's it!
I've now set a custom white balance
in camera. Now I am shooting in RAW
so in theory I could do this later on
but setting it in camera
means that I can actually show my subject
a picture that looks the right color
because if you
don't do that,
hey Beth what do you reckon of that?
That's what happens if you show
them the wrong colored picture.
Show them the right color picture
and you're on a good start
to getting a good shot
from your model.
Also it saves you a ton of time
in post-processing, if you've got your colors
roughly right at this stage
and anything that saves time
is a good idea.
Now it's worth noting if you shoot
with mirrorless cameras like my Olympus
then the electronic viewfinder
will probably show you the white balance
you've just set,
which is almost certainly the wrong color
for the ambient light in the room.
For example my video lights
are a slightly different color
to my flash,
so when you're looking
through the viewfinder,
don't panic if the colors look a bit wrong
just make sure they look good
when you take the shots.
The third step of the process
is all about image processing
but before we get onto my computer
we need to take a picture of this,
so this is the color checker passport
fully opened up,
so I can see the individual color swatches
and the way this works
is just like the gray card
I give this to Beth
making sure she doesn't put her fingers
across the front. There we go
and I take a photograph of the chart
in the same light that's on the model,
so this time Beth's going to hold
that right up against the face that's lovely
and let's take a shot of that. Here we go!
And that's all I need!
Once that's done,
I just load that into the computer
and make a profile. We'll get to that in a little bit
and it won't matter even if I change the color
of the background light
because once I've got this chart,
I've got a complete color reference
for the main light that's lighting Beth
and that color isn't going to change
throughout this shoot.
So with the shoot done,
it's time to create
a custom profile
that matched the lighting, the camera
and the lens that I was using in the shoot.
Now from here on there's lots of ways
of going about this
and it will depend on which system
you use. There are plenty of profiling
options around. I'm using the XRite
color passport system,
so I'll use the color checker passport
and the first thing I need to do
is actually go and get one of my RAW files
and bring it into Photoshop
because that's the software
I want to use to make my profile
and do my edits.
So this is the RAW file
that I have with the picture
of the color checker passport
and in fact what I need
is this image saved as a DNG file
and I'll find that if I just go down
to the Save button at the bottom of the screen
and choose the the name
as a file extension DNG.
I'll save it in the same location
or at least in the desktop
so I can find it really
easily and that's it, I'm done!
So now if I jump back to my desktop,
I'll find that there is a DNG file.
There it is.
All I need to do to make my color profile
is launch the color checker passport
software and as it says
drag and drop a DNG file there,
so I'll drag and drop a DNG file
and just wait for a few seconds,
and it's done!
It's all automated,
it crops it,
it finds the squares,
it does absolutely everything.
I just click on create profile,
give it a unique name
for example Adorama test,
click Save and that's it.
It saves as a color profile.
Right we can close all that down now,
go find the original RAW file
and see how that affected the pictures.
Now I'm using Adobe Camera Raw
and by default I'm going to get the Adobe color profile,
so if I drop that down
and choose browse,
I can come down to the profile button here
and there it is Adorama test
and if I go across between the Adobe version
and my own created version,
you can see how much
more red those Reds are,
have a look at Beth's shirt as well,
her blouse there is definitely more blue
and then you'll see the individual color swatches
have all changed as well,
so I'll click on that
to make that active,
close it down
and then that's it,
I don't have to do anything
else other than the usual editing
of my pictures.
Now how do I do this
for all of my images?
Because I took a lot of images
during that shoot.
Well we could batch edit everything.
Bring them all through in one go,
but because I'm using the same lights
in the same room,
with the same camera
and the same lens,
that profile is going to get used
over and over again.
This isn't something you have to do
on every single shoot.
It's just when things change.
So for me, I'm going to come back
to Camera Raw
and choose this little icon
in the top corner
and set this as a new Camera Raw default,
so every image I open up from now on,
will have this color profile
and that's it. I'm done!
I can make a few other changes
but really all of my images
now are going to get exactly
the same edit and straight out of camera.
They immediately look better.
If you've enjoyed this video,
don't forget to leave me a comment below
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I'm Gavin Hoey,
thanks for watching.