 |
White Balance |
Quickly improve the quality of your photos: By far one of the simpliest
and fastest ways to improve the quality of your photos is to manually adjust
white balance. Photos that looked nice before will 'pop' after setting an
accurate white balance -- and Capture NX makes that process very easy.
Why adjusting under 'RAW' is so important: Adjusting White Balance
under 'RAW Adjustments' is so important, instead
of using other Adjustments, because of how
Capture NX handles NEF dynamic range --
it truncates the upper end of the dynamic range.
So, you want to make a white balance adjustment before any dynamic range
in your photo is truncated, not after.
Auto White Balance: Most digital cameras are decent at automatically
determining the nearly correct white balance setting. But after playing
around with white balance in some of your photos, I believe that you will
quickly realize how much better an accurate white balance looks, instead
of a white balance that is 'close'.
Adjust White Balance: To adjust, go to the Edit List, under
'Base Adjustments' / 'Raw Adjustments',
and click on the arrow next to 'White Balance':
which will open up the White Balance properties dialog.
Marquee Sample: My preference is to
select 'Set Gray Point' and 'Marquee Sample', and then press 'Start':
Then zoom into your photo and find
any area that 'should' be white or gray (but currently is not)
-- something you know should have 'no color' -- and select a rectangular sample
by clicking, dragging, and releasing the mouse. If you don't like the white
balance correction results, try again on another 'gray area'. Just use your
eyes and repeat as needed until you are happy with the new white balance.
The entire point of white balance in Capture NX is that you are selecting
a rectangular sample area in your photo that 'should' have no 'color' to it,
but currently, does have a color tinge to it. Doing so allows NX to remove
that 'color' from your entire photo, correcting for 'white balance'.
Marquee vs Point: In my experience, a marquee sample works a lot
better than a single point for setting white balance (especially in higher
ISO photos). A single point can be affected by noise, whereas in a sampled
area, the noise tends to average itself out, and all you are left with is
the important color information.
You don't always have to look for 'white': In the photo below, the
obvious choice for a marquee sample area is a patch of white on the dress.
But in this example, a marquee sample was actually taken from the gray
background (light filtering threw air with a little smoke).
White Balance Issues are Subtle:
Most people do not notice slight color casts in images. The best thing
you can do to train your eye is to edit some of your existing photos, playing
around with White Balance under RAW Adjustments. I suspect that you will
find that most photos benefit from subtle white balance adjustments.
Exposure Trick: If you have a hard time seeing incorrect white balance,
sometimes (but not always) temporarily adjusting
expsoure
to +2EV will exagerate the color imbalance, allowing you to clearly color
the imbalance.
If NX101.com helps you, help this site by making a donation.
|
