This blog post is a quick one but if you’re a newer photographer or even someone who’s just interested, I have a tip that can save you HOURS of your time!
I mentioned it in my previous blog post which you can read here on equipment you can invest in to carry your work further! Have you ever taken photos inside and noticed that they turn EVERYTHING a ghastly shade of yellow?
Or you take some pictures outside right after the sun goes down and somehow the golden light has all faded and everything is tinted blue? This is because of the auto white balance on your camera.
Here’s a great article that explains the temperature of light and how your camera reads it! If you’re anything like me, you’ll spend so much time tweaking your hues/saturation or color temperature in a photo editing software trying to coax your picture back to neutral colors that match your aesthetic or what the colors really looked like to your eyes when you took the pictures!
This is probably the most crucial part of my editing process and I recently figured out one small thing that you can do to save you soo much time! If you’ve seen me during any of my more recent shoots you’ve seen me pull out this circular white cap anytime we switch location or the lighting changes.
This is a magical little tool called a white balance filter. It’s simply a card that is 18% white and that your camera can read under any light setting to figure out how it needs to correct its reading of the colors around you in order to color the cap the white in your pictures. This essentially takes out all the yellow or the blue or whatever tinted light you have in your pictures saving you so much time in post-production and yields more natural looking photos.
The way to use it is to set your camera’s white balance on preset/manual and take a picture with the filter covering your lens towards the light source from where you would have your subject stand. Here’s a quick video tutorial to guide any of you Nikon users. Here’s the widely used (but more expensive) version you can buy and here’s the one that I use. Mine does happen to show more warm/red results but that’s the way I would edit the pictures anyways, so it works well for me!
READY TO START PUTTING SYSTEMS IN PLACE IN YOUR BUSINESS?
If you’re wondering what the inside of a successful & streamlined photography business that focuses heavily on creating an incredible client experience, then the Behind the Business Course & Toolkit is for you!
It includes everything from email templates, client questionnaires, workflows for portraits & questionnaires, a breakdown of a profitable marketing strategy & how to streamline and organize each and every part of your business to grow it quickly through happy clients.
More of a visual learner? Be sure to watch the totally-free masterclass to uplevel your client experience and triple your prices!
