White balance a photograph after it has been taken?

6 years 4 months ago #553141 by brianstoiber
The company I work for is going to be developing a project that involves photographing different materials. We want to capture the actual colors or as close to as possible. I was wondering, if I had a card of some type inserted in the picture of a color that I knew. After the photograph was taken, would I be able to adjust the picture so that the color in the card matched what it actually was? 
We are going to be photographing in imperfect lighting conditions so this was an idea that was thrown out to maybe help with getting a better color match. 


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6 years 3 months ago #553285 by garyrhook
If, as far as you can control it, the lighting is a single color, then just use a gray card or passport. If the lighting changes, you'll want to use it immediately before every shot.

Then, in Lightroom, you can use the eyedropper tool (on the gray cared) to set the WB values. Boom, done.

FWIW this has nothing to do with your situation. It's just how WB is managed with a digital camera.

If you have multiple light sources of differing colors, good luck with that. That's a horror to deal with, so try to mitigate.

Have you considered actually hiring a photographer with experience in this sort of thing? Might be a worthwhile investment as opposed to having to learn it all yourselves.


Photo Comments
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6 years 3 months ago #553301 by effron
The post eyedropper fix works much better with a raw file...

Why so serious?
Photo Comments
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6 years 3 months ago #553335 by rdubreuil
Colorchecker Passport.

xritephoto.com/colorchecker-passport-photo

For accurate color, camera/shoot specific profiles, if you've got Lightroom or Camera Raw correct the color and white balance using the profile for your camera and shoot specific lighting generated by the x-rite software. 

Once you've done the first image in the series just copy paste the same development settings to the rest of the images, color and WB done.

  Now you can move onto post processing the images knowing that your colors and WB are spot on.  Also be sure to calibrate any and all monitors you'll be viewing/post processing your work on so that they are showing you the correct colors.


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6 years 3 months ago #553632 by Joves

brianstoiber wrote: The company I work for is going to be developing a project that involves photographing different materials. We want to capture the actual colors or as close to as possible. I was wondering, if I had a card of some type inserted in the picture of a color that I knew. After the photograph was taken, would I be able to adjust the picture so that the color in the card matched what it actually was? 
We are going to be photographing in imperfect lighting conditions so this was an idea that was thrown out to maybe help with getting a better color match. 

:rofl:
This will be the only time you will hear me suggest this to someone. But here it is, set your camera to Automatic White Balance, with your Metering set to Matrix so it measures more of the scene. Then you just shoot in Raw+Jpeg Fine depending on how good you need the images for print, if it is being printed. If you shoot in RAW you can adjust the WB, in Jpeg you cannot, but if your Jpegs are good then you are good to go.


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