In this video I'll show you how to get consistent colors from your camera to your computer.
Adorama TV presents 'Take and Make Great Photography' with Gavin Hoey.
Hello, I'm Gavin Hoey and you're watching AdoramaTV, brought to you by Adorama, the camera store that
has everything for us photographers. Now I'll be absolutely honest if you're looking
for an exciting video about lighting, this one isn't it.
However, if you're looking for a video about color, about getting kind of
consistency from your eyes to your camera to your computer then this is essential
viewing and it should be. So, how do I get my camera to match my computer? Well I'm
actually not going to start with my camera settings. We'll get back to those in a
minute. For me, the whole thing about color management begins over at my desk
on my computer. Most of this video is all about getting the right color with your
camera but that becomes a pointless exercise if you can't see the right
colors on your monitor. I color calibrate my monitor once a month and I'm using
the Datacolor Spyder5 Elite as my color calibrating system. Now it comes with
its own software and once a month it reminds me just to pop this on the screen
like that, follow the information, it fires a bunch of colors, and I end up with a
color corrected monitor. Now that's good because this matches the International
color profiles. Yes, there is such a thing which means that my colors here will look
the same in six months time. Anybody who uses a color calibrator will see my
images as I see them. That's terrific but at the end, it also reminds me that this
monitor shows a hundred percent of the SRGB color space, which is why I edit in
that space, but not all of the Adobe RGB color space so I don't edit in that
space because I can't see all the colors and that's kind of useful too. To help me
with the photos, we brought Brian back into the studio. Now Brian is going to be the model
and as you can see, he's wearing a white top.
We've got a gray background. Behind him I've also got my painted gray background
and the white wall of the studio.
Now if you have no other means of sorting out the colors, you might
think that one of these would be perfect for getting a nice neutral gray and
correct colors. Well, let's put that to the test. Let's just take a simple picture like
this and see how it looks in Photoshop. OK, Brian here we go.
So I'm taking a nice wide shot. It's not exactly exciting but let's just get this into Photoshop and see if
we can get the correct color balance, using the gray backgrounds or Brian's white t-shirt.
I'm using Adobe Camera Raw inside of Photoshop CC but you could do this
exactly the same with the Develop Module in Lightroom because the tool I'm
going to use is up here, the white balance tool. Now, the reason I was so interested
in the greys in this shot is because this tool, what you do is you click on
something that you know is a pure gray. It doesn't matter where there is light or
dark has no other color contamination when you click on it
it will re-map your white balance and give you the correct colors. Now it doesn't look too
bad as it stands but if I click on this big gray paper background that's going to
re-map my colors so that gray paper background becomes neutral and I get a color
that's different. Is that better or right? Well, that's kind of the problem. I
do know, however, that my wall I painted a lovely tone of gray, so let's click on
the wall and I get, well, a sort of warmer tone, I guess. White is a gray. It's just a very, very
bright gray so maybe the white wall. OK, well,
maybe the white wall, where it's in shadow, maybe Brian's t-shirt. This is the
trouble. There's no consistency here whatsoever. In isolation they all look
fine, but which one is right? How do I get
a consistent gray or white balance from shot to shot and, perhaps, more
importantly, from shoot to shoot. Well, let's have a look at that. Now, we could
do something called a custom white balance right here in camera. If that's
the way you like to go, that's great. That's another video for me. I like to
take reference images, a known color range, particularly gray, then I can
use in Photoshop or Lightroom to get my colors accurate. Now, there are plenty of
ways you could do it. If you want
to go to the top end of the scale, something like this color chart is wonderful.
In fact if I just open this and carefully flip it over, trying not to get my fingers on the swatches,
you can see it comes with a lovely big gray card as well and it is gray that
I'm going to use. Now if that's a little bit expensive for your money, you can spend
less and get a similar result. So, spending less is one thing but spend
wisely. This was my very first gray card. So you can see its kind of a bendy foldy thing.
The trouble is the gray wasn't particularly gray. It looks gray.
It's not gray. Woops. OK, so a little bit more expensive, but a definite gray, a
branded product, something like this cube you can rely on to give you a consistent
gray. But the thing I use the most is actually this small credit card sized
gray card, so how do I use this gray card? Well, let's get a model in and see
how this whole gray card thing works. So, when I'm in the studio and I need that
reliable source of constant gray, my tool of choice is
this. It's not my flash meter it's what's at the other end. I always keep a
simple credit-card sized gray card attached to my light meter. Now, I use it
really simply. I give it to the model. Here we go, Brian, if you want to hold that
and asked him just to hold it underneath their chin.
That's lovely. Now, I've already metered the light. I know this is going to work. That's terrific and
we have a nice simple gray card shot that I can then remove. And I can either do that at the beginning of the
session, the end of the session, halfway through the session. At some point with
this lighting I'll get a shot of my gray card and then I've got something to use and
get the rest of my shots the correct color. Let's take a few more shots.
Once again I'm going to do this inside of Photoshop's camera Raw. We'll move to
Lightroom for the next little bit of white balance but what I've got is a couple of
images here. This is my gray card shot and this is the shot that I actually
want to process. As you can see they've both got the same settings, same white balance and so on.
Now to apply the white balance from my gray card, first of all I need to select
all of the images I want to apply this to, that's both of these. So if I come up to
the top corner I can choose Select All and then they are linked together. That
means that if I come and do something like change the white balance temperature,
you see that both the top and the bottom images change. So once again it's a
matter of getting that white balance tool but this time, rather than clicking on
the gray background, I'm going to click on the gray card. I know that's a lovely
gray. I know it's going to be the same gray every single shot, every single shoot and
that means that they're linked together so this ends up of course the
right white balance as does this shot as well. Just to show you, that's what I
recorded and that is the subtle difference but a definite improvement in
the white balance and a consistent white balance as well. In my camera, I've set
the white balance to electronic flash and that should mean I get a nice
consistent color I don't use auto white balance because that will give me the
white balance of the room lights, not flash. Now, if you think well if it's an
electronic flash why do I need to bother with the white balance. I mean I'm in
a studio. I'm not on location so there aren't any red walls to influence the
color of light. There's no changing of day to influence the color of light.
Well, it's because not all flashes produce exactly the same color of
light. Some might be warmer, some might be colder. As the flash ages, its color might
change. So if you set your camera up a year ago to do one flash then a year later it
can be slightly different. But just doing things like taking a bare light and
putting it into a softbox, that can have a difference to the color of light too.
Even something as simple as changing power on some lights can change the color.
Maximum power might be a slightly different tone to minimum power. A gray card
is a great way to check these things out and if you do a few gray card shots as
you move your lights around during the session, you should get some lovely consistency
throughout. If color accuracy is what you're aiming for, and nothing but perfect
will do, maybe you're doing product photography or fashion, where the colors
of the clothes absolutely matter, you need to get yourself one of these. It's not
a tablet. It is in fact a Spyder checker. Now, this looks like it's a bunch of makeup
swatches. It's not. It's actual color swatches, and with a bit of software in the computer we
can get a perfect color balance match. Now, to use it, open it up and give it your model so
Brian, if you want to hold that for me. Now, a couple of things are important whether it's this
from Datacolor or a different one from a different brand, few things you need to
do. Make sure that the model's fingers, if they're holding it, aren't covering any
of the color swatches. That's really important.
Make sure it's in the lighting that you're going to be using. That's
important, and make sure you get a shot. So let's actually take a photograph. Now the
photograph I'm going to take isn't the closeup. You might think you only
want to do a close up of this but, it's actually a wide shot that can then crop
down in the computer and apply a little bit of simple software to analyze the
color swatches, create a color profile and I can apply to other shots taken in
exactly the same lighting and guarantee myself perfect white balance shot after shot after shot.
Hopefully the advice in this video has put you in the right direction for great
color control in your photographs, but of course there are things that can happen
outside of your control. For example, if you make videos and upload them to
YouTube, that can do some really weird stuff to your colors.
So for YouTube, what I've done is I've got my color chart that they don't mess up the
color in this video.
OK so here we go. And of course if you're an AdoramaTV viewer you need to be clicking on the
subscribe button!
I'm Gavin Hoey. Thanks for watching.