Younes Bounhar Photography

Balancing Act

After a week of non-technical posts, I am going to spend most of this week discussing, well, mostly technical aspects of photography (sorry Jenn, you know I just can’t resist it). Did you really expect anything different? I mean come on, I am a scientist, hardcore geek, a nerd. And for the record, I fully embrace my nerditude, so your efforts to deride it will be vain, ha! I also expect that someday geeks will rule the world, but I digress…

One of the most overlooked parameter in digital photography has to be White Balance (I mean with a name like that are you really surprised!). Most people simply set their camera to Auto WB and just leave it at that. In fact one of the main reasons I shoot in RAW is to have the flexibility to modify the WB in post-processing. Granted RAW gives you other things as well, but WB flexibility is high up on my list. Most of you already know this  (I actually found out there are people who read this blog, so I don’t have to pretend anymore, really pumped!), so I won’t dwell on this. Instead, I would like to focus on a little trick that makes WB even more invaluable.

When your camera determines the appropriate WB, it evaluates the scene and makes an “average reading” that will apply to the entire scene. Likewise, when you manually set WB, the chosen value will be applied to the entire photographs. In most situations, this perfectly fine and you don’t need to go any further. However, there are many cases, where a single “generic” WB setting cannot render the scene properly.

Take for example, the photograph posted above. This picture was taken in LaJolla, CA, as the marine layer was coming in and out of the coast. The sun was filtering through the layer and imparting a beautiful golden glow on the rocks. On the other hand, any area that wasn’t directly lit, was fairly bluish and cool.

In this case, had I chosen a cool WB setting (say 4500 K), the entire scene would have come out blue, not reflecting the contrast between warm and cool tones (photo 1 below).

Conversely, had I chosen a warmer WB setting (say 7500K) , I would have successfully recreated the golden glow, but lost the cool tones in the water (see photo below).

The solution here, is pretty simple: WB blending. Digital gives us the flexibility to merge several  photographs into one, so why not take full advantage of it? Instead of being bound by the limitations of the medium I am shooting on, I simply double processed the same frame. Once with a cool WB, a second time with warmer WB. The two images were blended in Photoshop, a little contrast tweak and tadaaaa!