Thread: flash photography and WB

I am just full of questions lately aren't I? ... I'm sorry just have another one. DH bought me a gray card yesterday. yay! it has a gray side and a white side. I tried using it but with the onboard flash. It was dark and I didn't bring my speedlight. Anyway, I just wanted to test it out. I thought I did it right. I took a picture of it filling the frame basically and then set that as my custom white balance. But then when I go into PS the cmyk %'s are off. Well kind of anyway. For example (1, 24, 26) and according to Amber's tutorial on skin tones, this picture is a little too warm......right? I tried fixing it but nothing looked good and isn't the whole point of a gray card to help with your WB? this is basically sooc. didn't do anything with it in acr. Just resized and sharpened for web in PS. Is using the flash on the camera always going to make the pictures warm? I hardly ever use flash unless for snapshots but I was just anxious to try out the gray card.

it's me and excuse that white mark on my arm. I don't know what that is.



~L

I didn't check the numbers but given the numbers you quoted and looking at the pic I would say it is pretty good. The numbers indicate that their is a lot of red and not enough cyan but I am not really seeing that in the pic and the cyan number is the least reliable when looking at skin tones. I would look at a few more samples. But to the eye it looks pretty good to me.

There was a thread on ILP recently about how a truely WB picture usually looks too warm to us when we first start seeing them. If I can find it I'll post it.

that would be great thank you

There are parts of your skin (in your face and chest) that the red channel is blown meaning it is at 255 so there is no cyan there at all. Other than that the colour looks good, it's just from the harsh flat light of the flash causing the lack of cyan in the image but I wouldn't say it looks too warm at all, looks fine to me (though I do need to recalibrate) and the numbers sound fine too.

I'm not calibrated, and I'm no where near a pro... so I don't have anything to add... except how awesome that you got a grey card to start learning with! I want to get one, too, just haven't gotten around to it yet. Man... if only my husband knew what a grey card was and had the knowledge and idea to buy one for me... hah!

I actually started a topic similar to this on ILP and someone mentioned that same thread and I would like to see it too - the images that I adjust with my greycard look SOOOO warm to me (red)!