Moose, Chuck, Jeff & Adam
Thanks to all of you for your suggestions. I was hoping one of you would
make a suggestion as I respect each of your opinions highly. It is great to
hear from all of you.
Adding a reference white card will definitely be my next step. I had kind of
forgotten the WhiteBal since it came up a while back. It occurs to me that
the technique was basically what I was doing with my last round of test
images (the subject was wearing a white shirt). Sometime the solution is
right in front of you and you can't see it!
Thanks also for the lighting setup tips. In the studio setups I was working
totally by flash with local ambient lighting off and window blinds drawn to
avoid them introducing problems. This week I am in the latter stages of
doing the informal outside shoots for this project, applying my learning on
how to fill flash at the same time (chimping as much as metering to get the
balances right). Adding the WhiteBal to these sessions should be of great
help too.
As far as profiling goes I will have to speak with MPIX about their side of
things but I will be adding an Eye-one puck to my system next week to help
get my viewing conditions under better control. Since this is only the start
of me doing this for hire I determined I would use an outside lab for
printing rather than try and print at home. My anticipated volume is not
super high but it adds up, this last week I have taken somewhere just north
of 2000 shots in both formal and informal poses for a group of around 350
people. Great exercise for my E-1 and me!
Anyway thanks again for all your suggestions and advice.
Dan S.
-----Original Message-----
From: olympus-owner@xxxxxxxxxx [mailto:olympus-owner@xxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf
Of Moose
Sent: Friday, September 01, 2006 9:10 PM
To: olympus@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [OM] Re: Grey Points & White Balance Issues
Daniel Sepke wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I hope this question doesn't get lost in all current surge of traffic
> but here goes. My question relates to color balancing of studio
> portraits from
> E-1 RAW files using Olympus Viewer.
>
What Chuck and Adam said. If you want to assure correct color balance, you
must have a standard reference. Lights vary, perhaps not much, but our eyes
are specially designed to be very sensitive to subtleties of skin color. I
prefer the WhiBal to the Kodak card both because it is easier to carry and
use and because it provides white and black references in addition to
neutral gray.
And I second Chuck's recommendation of the WhiBal tutorials, even if you use
some other reference. For what you are doing, it's pretty simple.
You have the subject hold your reference card for one shot. You do your
reference conversion using that shot, then do whatever is required in your
converter to use the same color balance for the rest.
Some who do work that requires perfect color reproduction go further and
shoot a MacBeath or IT8 target to provide color reference points for their
software. It should be pretty easy to do with an IT8 target and VueScan. You
can then create an icc profile for the shoot. People tend to think of
VueScan as only a scanning tool, but it's more versatile than that. You
could batch convert RAW files using the icc profile or batch color correct
already converted TIFFs or JPEGs by creating an icc profile from the
converted reference shot.
Does you printer provide icc profiles for their various printers/papers?
Using those would tighten things up even more.
Moose
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