As per jupiter's request in the equipment chat thread, here's a little rundown of the tools I've accumulated over the years for correcting white balance.

Tools of the Trade:

From left to right - The WhiBal Pocket, Expodisc 77mm, and Xrite ColorChecker Passport

White Balance
White balance is the ratio of yellow to blue and from green to purple in a photo to give you a true white. Your brain does an amazing job of determining what is really white when you're standing there looking at something, but even the best cameras struggle with white balance. Every manufacturer builds in some presets for warm tungsten lighting, greenish fluorescent lighting, and slightly blue sunlight, but most people skip those settings and leave the camera on auto white balance. It's rare that any of those settings are even remotely accurate, which is why there has been an explosion of white balance correction tools come out to market in the last couple of years.

The WhiBal and ColorChecker are similar in that they can be used to set white balance at a particular light source by means of reflected light. The Expodisc is a little different than those two since it uses incident light to set an average white balance for a scene. That difference is important to understand: The WhiBal and ColorChecker are more accurate than the Expodisc in most situations, but they have to be placed directly in the same light as your subject.

That's fine for most people's needs, but what if you're shooting something that's out of reach for a reading? That's where the Expodisc has a major advantage. It slips over the front of your lens to average out all the light coming in and lets your camera take a proper white balance reading. It's also very handy for situations where you have multiple light sources and you want to average the white balance between them.

So what's the difference between the WhiBal and the ColorChecker?
Quite a lot actually. The WhiBal does a good job of adjusting white balance, but that's really all it does. The ColorChecker can be used for adjusting white balance, but it also comes packaged with software that lets you build a calibration profile for your camera under any lighting condition you shoot in. A camera profile is like a recipe card that tells a photo editor how to adjust the colours that your camera recorded so that it will output the exact colours specified on the ColorChecker. Once you have built a profile for that lighting condition, you can use that profile for as many photos as you took in the same lighting with literally two mouse clicks.

Since no two cameras are the same, every image editing program on the market relies on "canned" or generic profiles for your particular make and model of camera. Some are better than others, but nothing is as good a profile that's made specifically for your camera, especially one that's made specifically for the light you're shooting in.

I can see this tool being very useful for wedding and event photographers who may have multiple shooters all shooting with different cameras. If they all were calibrated with the ColorChecker, their colors would be nearly identical. Nikon and Canon have always had different ways of handling colours, so it could be advantageous to calibrate all of the cameras to the same standard.

The ColorChecker software also lets you build your own "dual-illuminant" profiles. As the name implies, these profiles include readings under two different light sources. What you do is take a ColorChecker shot under tungsten and another shot under sunlight, then the software will bundle them together into one megaprofile for your camera. This profile will be your generic profile that's custom made for your camera, but it will work under just about any situation, because Adobe can blend between the two profiles for any light source. It's better than the Adobe Standard profile, but not as accurate as shooting a separate profile for any given lighting condition.


Here is a sample under strong tungsten lighting... you be the judge:


Top Left: White balance was straight out of the camera (on auto) and uses the Adobe Standard profile in Lightroom.
Top Right: White balance was set to Tungsten on the camera and uses the Adobe Standard profile.
Bottom Left: White balance was set with my WhiBal and uses the Adobe Standard profile.
Bottom Right: White balance was set with the ColorChecker and I used the Xrite software to create a custom ColorChecker profile for the scene.


You could get the image that was corrected with the WhiBal to match the calibrated image in the bottom right with some tweaking, but that's the point of the ColorChecker, you shouldn't have to tweak every photo to get accurate colours! It's about five times as expensive as the WhiBal, so it's definitely a judgement call you'll have to make, but if you spend a lot of time tweaking colours so they're just right, you should factor in what your time is worth to you. I was lucky enough to get one for Christmas, so I didn't have to make that call, but I'm pretty sure I would have picked one up eventually anyway.

There are a bunch of other features to the ColorChecker, which the manufacturer has done a great job of illustrating on their site, so I won't extend this post any longer than it already is.
http://www.xritephoto.com/ph_product...257&tab=videos

If I've left anything out here, please feel free to ask.

Dan

 

Thanks for the information Dan. Definitely looks like something to pick up.

 

Great info, Dan. Thanks for the post. For the time being, I'm content with the WhiBal.

 

Just figured out what to do with a amazon.com gift card...

 

I think you'll like it. Adobe's Nikon profiles are far better than the ones they made for Canon bodies, but the ColorChecker profiles will be the best of all because it's made specifically for your camera and it's specific to the light you're shooting in. There's just no way a canned profile could do as good of a job.

 

I have been happy with those than what I got with Canon. I don't find myself making too many changes with it in LR. But there have been some that I just can't nail. I will use the older D2's profiles from time to time in LR as well.

 

If there are some shots you've taken that are just not quite right, you can roll a new profile for that camera with the ColorChecker under similar light and go back to apply that profile to the old shot. It's not exact, but it could be better than what you have now.

 

Great info and post, Dan. Thank you.