White Balance Braketing with Canon EOS 450D

[pashminu]

<p>Hi!<br>

I am into product photography and have the following basic equipment:<br>

Canon EOS 450D<br>

18-55mm IS Kit Lens<br>

125 W x 2 lights<br>

Vivitar 3600 Tripod<br>

How do I get a perfectly white background, <strong>without working in Photoshop?</strong></p>

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[railphotog]

<p>Check your camera manual, on how to set a custom white balance. It's all explained there.</p>

<p> </p>

[bill_mussett1]

<p>Follow Bob's advice to check your manual for "how-to". If you don't have a gray card, try this trick to determine white balance. Cover the front of the lens with a white paper coffee filter. Shoot an image thru the filter of whatever you're photographing with the lighting you plan to use. Then use that image as your base image for the custom white balance setting in your camera. Be sure to shoot using RAW then develop using Canons Digital Photo Professional (DPP) software that came with your camera. Open DPP and under white balance adjustment click on the eyedropper to select it then click on your base image. The base image should turn gray. Under Edit select copy recipe to clipboard; select your first product image then under Edit select paste recipe to selected image. You may still need to fine-tune the color temperature or other settings slightly. Be sure you are using a truly white background. If you're still unable to get a perfect white background you may need to resort to Photoshop to completely remove the background. By perfect I mean a 255-255-255 reading across the entire background.</p>

[andrewg_ny]

<p>That's <em>"The watch"</em> ?</p>

<p>As Bob & Bill said, custom white balance would be the way to go if trying to do it in-camera. I am not under the impression however that gray cards are ideal for setting white balance--I believe you actually want to set the custom white balance using a white object, such as your background. </p>

<p>What gray cards are definitely for, however, is setting exposure. And the situation you describe and is a good example of where a gray card would have helped. You need to remember that your camera's light meter doesn't know that background is white. It wants to expose so that whatever you're shooting has the luminance of 18% gray (like a gray card). If you shoot a predominantly white scene with auto exposure (or the meter centered in manual), the camera will render it as gray. If you want it to look white, you need to increase exposure. By metering with a gray card, your subject will be 'correctly' exposed, which should be a goal so that your product's appearance is accurate. You will also find that in this case you'll get whiter whites for your background as well. </p>

<p>Now if you find that your background still isn't quite white (which could be in part because your lighting is insufficient and it isn't *quite* white, you can try overexposing just a little to help it clip white. This is also overexposing your product as well so this may become less accurate. A way to fix this in post processing might be to apply a curve/change contrast/boost highlights a bit so that the almost-white will be rendered as white.</p>

<p>While 'getting it right in-camera' is generally recommended, I would not particularly recommend using white-balance bracketing in-camera. Use manual WB and if that's not good enough, correct during post-processing. Shooting RAW is also preferred because the white-balance/color corrections are non-destructive.</p>

<p>If you're using the right software your white balance and curve/constrast corrections can be automatically replicated for all the similar shots in your shoot so you won't have to correct each individually. Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Bridge/Camera RAW, ACDSee Pro, and others should be able to do this.</p>

[tom_anderson9]

Here's a trick - if you want the background to have no color cast, use the background to set the camera's custom white balance. Even if the background isn't pure white, the camera will make it so, that's how a custom white balance works. Normally you want use pure white or grey to set the balance, but in this case you want the background to be white, even if it really isn't. If the background then comes out grey, you have an exposure issue, not white balance.

[pashminu]

<p>Thank you so much, all of you. I need to experiment some more the next time setup my studio.</p>

[william l. palminteri]

<p>Pashminu, I use a neat little plug called "Smartcurve" to look at all my JPEGs and here's what I got when I selected "auto" on your shot. One klik, darn close.<br />Here's the link...http://free.pages.at/easyfilter/curves.html<br />You can run it in any program that understands 8bf (photoshop compatible) plugins.<br>

No photoshop, and done in the dreaded JPEG format (LOL) !<br>

<br />Bill P.</p><div></div>