You know – it looked better in real life.

I’ve heard this comment many times from people showing off some of their shots of flowers and sunsets and of colorful events.

It just doesn’t have to be the case.  Most of the time, shooting during the golden hour or the blue hour gives you a different quality of light. Using automatic white balance setting on your camera may produce unwanted results (like too cool or too warm).

As you know, the temperature of the light source greatly affects the image.  In the film days, we used film specific to the predominant light source (like Tungsten or Daylight).  As well, we used filters to correct for colour casts under differing light sources – like flourescent lights.

The digital world has made this task slightly simpler.  As a matter of fact, too easy.  As the technology improves, and the programming becomes more complex to recognize the myriad lighting conditions, we are doing less to recognize and correct for difficult lighting situations.

So what happens when we continue to rely on the technology to “be accurate”? You get a lot of the phrase ” it looked better in real life”. 

Is it really a major problem?  Maybe it did look better in real.  Memories are always fonder in these situations. Colours always seem richer in our fond memories. 

However, you can do your best to capture the image as your eyes and mind sees it.

If the desire is to reproduce the colors as accurately as possible, then you may want to invest in some white balance tools and other colour calibration tools.

Many of us know about monitor and printer calibration but, how many of you have calibrated the capture at the camera level?  A lot of us do depend on proper exposure to get a fairly accurate image.   However, you can use other tools to calibrate the sensor.

Currently, I’ve been using X-Rite’s Color Checker Passport which allows not only white balance to a neutral white but allows to warm or cool the image.  Other products that I have used are the Color Balance Coach and Whibal.com cards.

The added bonus of the X-Rite ColorChecker is that you can create custom color profiling for use in your RAW workflow.  For this I do recommend that you check out the better written reviews of this product.

• Review by Luminous Landscape
• Review by Northlight Images (UK)
• Google search for X-Rite ColorChecker Passport reviews

What ever product you’ve managed to use, consider something to manage your colour and white balancing. 

Usually, I will take a reference photo of my X-Rite card at the beginning of a shoot and again when the lighting conditions change..

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Here, I have my reference photo for my bright sunlight situations and again when I was inside the dark abandoned home.

All these tools for white balancing are handy to have around and can be used to set the proper level prior to shooting, or to verify after shooting, or both.

As you become accustomed to using these tools and similar devices, it can become part of your daily shooting workflow.  It can save your butt if you happen to forget to reset your camera settings from the previous shoot. It won’t be a perfect save, but if you did fiddle with the WB settings (say you shot under the sodium lights at night or in the flourescent environment in the office).

In situations, where you find yourself shooting under mixed and unknown lighting conditions, these tools will certainly make your photography more colour accurate and truer to life.

By the way, this can apply to video as well as stills photography…