Color exists in various proportions in any lighting situation. Its hue, tone, and intensity depends upon ambient light,or lighting that seems to come from all directions (rather than from a single source) and fills a scene, shedding light on the objects you’re photographing. Your camera measures ambient light with a value known as color temperature. Essentially, color temperatureis the blueness or orangeness of the light that you see.
Color temperature variances can be corrected by covering your lens with a filter, offsetting odd-colored tones that are created by ambient light. For exam-ple, with a conventional film camera, you need to use a skylight filter, one that reduces the blue tones that occur at high color temperatures. While your dig-ital camera likely has both automatic and manual white balance settings, you may still find the need (or desire) to use photographic filters in front of your lens. Your white balance choice may include Daylight, Shade (or Cloudy), Fluorescent, and Incandescent (or Tungsten). Generally speaking, you’ll leave your camera set to Auto, but there may be times that you want to use an incor-rectwhite balance setting for special effects. You might, for example, make a snow scene bluer by taking the photo with white balance set to Incandescent/
Tungsten. Or you might want to make an indoor fireplace or candle scene seem even warmer and cozier by shooting with white balance set to Daylight.
Knowledge of color temperature with respect to your white balance set-tings can ensure that you get the optimum color results because ambi-ent light has a color temperature value. Different light sources emit light at different color temperatures, causing your picture to lean either to a red or blue hue. A high color tem-perature shifts light toward blue (as in Figure 8-11), and a low color tem-perature shifts light toward red hues (as in Figure 8-12).
Figure 8-10:Noise comprises tiny dots that can appear at high ISOs.
Figure 8-11:When color temperature is high, more blue light exists.
Figure 8-12:When color temperature is low, like in a production, more red light exists.
Tweaking white balance settings also enables you to deceive your camera into giving you results that will enhance your images. Toying with your white balance settings can turn deserts into icy retreats, prickly and cold, or set the indoors afire with a global warming–like result — color science that makes art “art.”
Take some time and play around with your camera’s white balance settings adding warmth (by increasing reds) or coolness (by increasing blue) when you’re photographing in daylight. You’ll need only a little while to determine your favorite settings to fool — I mean, set — your camera. Figure 8-13 illus-trates the relationship between sources of light and color temperature, showing how the color temperature changes with different ambient light around your subject/scene.
Excel chart created by Matt Bamberg.
Figure 8-13:Low color temperatures (indoors) appear with red hues; high color temperatures (outdoors) appear with blue hues.
If you set the camera to a shade white balance while taking a picture in broad daylight, your digital camera adds more red tones into the scene. Check the Kelvin color temperature chart (refer to Figure 8-13) to see that overcast conditions are about 6000° K. Light shade conditions are about 7100° K.
Therefore, setting your white balance to Shade adds more red tones than setting your camera to Overcast when you shoot in daylight. Some digital cameras allow you to enter the Kelvin temperature for your white balance so that you have maximum control over the amount of red or blue tones that you add to your shot.
9000 8000 7000 6000 5000 4000 3000 2000 1000 0
Candle Flame 40-Watt Incandescent Light 75-Watt Incandescent Light 100-Watt Incandescent Light 500-Watt Incandescent Light Professional Photo Lamp Photoflood Lamp Daylight Blue Photoflood Sunrise orSunset One Hour afterSunrise Early Morning or Late Afternoon SummerSunlight at Noon Overcast Sky Light SummerShade Average SummerShade Color Temperature
Color Temperature
Light Source
The Auto White Balance (AWB) mode on your camera uses its sensors to cal-culate the white balance for the image. Usually, the Kelvin (K) temperature range for AWB is 3000–7000° K. Using AWB normally provides a good image albeit with some color temperature distortion that you see with film — for example, the same blues and reds as seen in Figures 8-11 and 8-12, respectively.
Warmer light of sunrise yields to the cooler light of midmorning. After twilight, when light dims, conditions for shooting change fast. Now is when your ISO should drop to capture better color in your shots.
If you’re shooting where shadows abound, or perhaps the sun is in front of you, you’ll need to manually adjust your camera’s exposure or you may have trouble with your images when you go to edit. Lackluster colors, washed with black, are likely to appear. These are colors that won’t budge from stubborn hues; they’re unmanageable and easily pixilated, even when you’re using the best tools that Photoshop has to offer. The pink Cadillac in Figure 8-14 isn’t done
jus-tice in this shot. Because the camera adjusted itself to avoid overexposing the sky in the background, the subject of the photo is too dark. Manually set-ting the camera to a larger aperture and a slower shutter speed could have produced a lovely photo.
For the most natural color results in a picture taken with a digital camera, set the white balance indoors to your digital camera’s indoor (incandescent or fluorescent) setting. If you’re shooting outdoors in the shade, set it to the Shade/Overcast setting.
Setting your digital camera to automatic is your best bet because if you go to photograph a crimson cardinal outside your window without having changed the white balance from your last (indoor) shot to either automatic or daylight, your picture will be a throw-away.
The film for a traditional camera and the sensor for a digital camera are opti-mized for daylight color temperature. Whether you use film and then digitize your negatives, or shoot a picture using the sensor on a digital camera, your pic-ture will edge to one hue or the other (blue or red) as your light source varies unless the white balance setting is adjusted, either automatically or manually.
Experimenting with settings can create interesting effects — effects that people might just buy and hang on their walls. If you’ve made a mistake but find your image looking good, don’t dump it. It could be a valuable print.
Fortunately, when you manipulate your image in Photoshop, tweaking your picture to normal color levels is fairly easy — and by normal,I mean the levels that your eye would see.
Figure 8-14:Dark hues hide colors.