Re: crank the saturation
Re: crank the saturation
- Subject: Re: crank the saturation
- From: Ben Goren <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 08 May 2013 15:01:34 -0700
On May 8, 2013, at 2:38 PM, Spinnaker Photo Imaging Center <email@hidden> wrote:
> Hi Ben. I tried this exercise and did not have the extra patches. Do the extra patches make a difference.
If you've got them, they help. It works without them.
> Also, where in the exercise is the saturation cranked high? Guess I don't follow in what software is all this being done in.
You'd be doing this in Adobe Camera Raw, Lightroom, Canon's Digital Photo Processor, or a similar raw development application, and you'd be doing it to set the white balance.
The idea is that, by increasing saturation, you make it that much more visually obvious how far off the white balance is. It's especially visible in neutral patches. Small errors in white balance that aren't very noticeable with normal saturation tend to stand out a lot with the saturation cranked all the way up.
That's where the extra patches in the Passport come into play, as they're only very slightly saturated and they're right on the black body color axis. If one of those looks neutral, you know you've got a problem because it's not supposed to be neutral. You also have a good idea which direction to shift the white balance in to fix...though, really, just fiddling the knobs until you can't make it any better is as good a strategy as any.
To clarify: the idea is to adjust the white balance (and only the white balance) with the saturation at its maximum setting until the image, especially the neutral patches, appears to have no (or minimal) color casts. Obviously, it's still going to be ugly with the saturation all the way up; your goal is to adjust white balance until the ugliness is minimized, and then return the saturation to normal.
The problem with using the eyedropper to set white balance is that you're just neutralizing that one single patch. There may well be -- and virtually always is -- some sort of a very subtle color cast affecting that particular sample. By cranking the saturation and using your eyes, you're adjusting the overall white balance of the entire scene, not just of that one single patch.
Exposure and white balance can interact with each other. I'd probably recommend starting by using the eyedropper to get white balance close; then adjusting the exposure slider until the N8 patch is as close to you can get to 118/118/118; then cranking the saturation and adjusting the white balance that way; then returning saturation to normal and re-adjusting the exposure, and to continue bouncing back and forth between the two until you're no longer making any adjustments.
You can also do this with shots without a reference chart, but it's easier for the eye to get fooled in general scenery than with a standard chart with a bunch of neutral (and near-neutral) patches.
Later this week I hope to have time to do a proper writeup on my workflow, which includes a guess-free empirical method to normalize exposure and white balance both. But it doesn't work in Adobe products....
Cheers,
b&
P.S. I'm copying the list because I think others might benefit from a bit of clarification on the matter. b&
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