White Balance Tip for Lightroom

[ATJ]

I've just set up some presets in Lightroom for white balance and thought I'd share. This is something I had planned to do for ages but never got around to it.

If, like me, you take a lot of shots using flash and/or soft boxes, you can set up presets in Lightroom to set the white balance "correctly" for each combination of set lighting you use. For me, I regularly use one of 3 soft boxes. The soft boxes modify the colour of the light from the SB-800 so the white balance is not the same.

With each soft box, I took a photo of a gray card and loaded it into Lightroom. I then used the White Balance Selector (the eye dropper) in the Develop Module to determine the correct white balance. Next I stored just the white balance settings in a preset and named it appropriately.

When I take shots (and I always shoot raw) I don't need to worry about the white balance setting of the camera and just have to click the appropriate preset in Lightroom to adjust the white balance appropriately.

I had previously set up presets in the camera for this, but frequently forgot to set the camera beforehand. Now it doesn't matter.

[Murray Foote]

If you're using custom camera calibration in Lightroom, as I think you may be, you could also presumably create calibration profiles for each lighting situation. A bit more involved, but perhaps it might be more accurate, especially if more than white balance might be at issue.

Regards
Murray

[ATJ]

True. I did go down that route a few months back. In the end I found that just the white balance preset got me 99% of the way there. I still use the camera profiles but the Adobe ones plus white balance are very good.

Also, not everyone has a colour checker chart. Everyone should at least have a gray card.

[DaveB]

This is a perfect application: exactly what the Develop Presets were designed for.

I do relatively little studio shooting and thus my white balances are often different on each shoot (and during each shoot). But I do use the Develop Presets for different IR filters on the same camera.

If you're using custom camera calibration in Lightroom, as I think you may be, you could also presumably create calibration profiles for each lighting situation. A bit more involved, but perhaps it might be more accurate, especially if more than white balance might be at issue.

Most people who use custom DNG profiles ("camera calibrations") do one per camera body, and adjust the white balance separately. A DNG profile should be made using test images from two different white balances, and the Camera Raw software then interpolates as required.

If you had some known lighting conditions you could indeed make a custom profile for those specific conditions, but it does make your workflow yet more complex, and there's a tradeoff against the possibly-more-accurate results that you have to make.

Also, not everyone has a colour checker chart. Everyone should at least have a gray card.

Well, if anyone doesn't have one and wants either a ColorChecker (for creating custom DNG profiles) or a WhiBal (for convenient white balancing, you could check out my eStore. The ColorChecker isn't cheap though.

[ATJ]

I do relatively little studio shooting and thus my white balances are often different on each shoot (and during each shoot).

If the lighting is consistent during a shoot, a shot of a gray card under the same conditions can be used in exactly the same way. i.e. create a preset just for that shoot. You already knew that, for sure, but others may not have thought of it.

[DaveB]

Yeah, but in that case I don't bother with a preset. I can easily select all the relevant images in a block and just Synchronise the appropriate settings from one "fixed" photo without having to clutter up my Develop Presets with one that I'll never use again. I would save a preset if I was likely to want those settings again later.
It's just a question of personal workflow.