A lot of people ask me how to do color balancing. How much of it is subjective/objective? What's the best approach? Is there a system to it, or is it all about art?
Give it a try! It's pretty fun. This is what you see when you start:
This is what you want to end up with when you're done:
You get a score at the end.
Have fun!
This is a complex subject that I have an easy, fast, and systematic way of dealing with it. A professional photographer doesn't need to have a perfect sense of what white color should be. He/she simply needs to balance the color such that there is a good separation of non-white colors and white colors. In today's world, color balancing is done in several ways. One camp of school is to do it in-camera and shoot JPG and set the WB setting perfectly the first time. This leaves no room for error because a wrong color balance setting on the camera can mean un-recoverable color tones. The other camp of school is to shoot in RAW and post-process the RAW. Post processing is easy. If a picture has bits of perfect white/gray color, he/she can tell the program what that white/gray tone is, and thus set the entire picture into perfect tones. However, not all white and gray-looking surfaces are of balanced colors. Most likely, all surfaces have a hint of blue/yellow, or variation with hue in them. In addition, certain lighting conditions simply do not produce a balanced lighting (CFL, sodium light), in which case it's best to turn the photograph into black and white.
In many cases, one needs to use his/her eyes to make the final judgement. This requires 1) having good sets of eyes and 2) color balanced monitors (most Macs are pretty good). Without good eyes, a perfect monitor is useless. Likewise, the reverse is true.
To date, I only found one good site that tests your eye's ability to distinguish color. It is XRite http://www.xrite.com/custom_page.aspx?PageID=77
Give it a try! It's pretty fun. This is what you see when you start:
This is what you want to end up with when you're done:
You get a score at the end.
Now about the subjective part. One can always tone a picture to look a certain way. After color balancing, it is easy to add a bit more yellow (to look more vintage, to give more warmth at night, etc), or a little bit of blue (to give a little bit of that cold look). What I do personally is to always color balance first, THEN tone the picture. Reverse the order and you'll get into a lot of weird results and inconsistency. In summary, do the followings in this order:
1) Get good monitors, and calibrate it using tools like Spyder 3, etc.
2) Verify that you have a decent sense of color by going to the XRite site
3) White balance your pictures
4) Tone if necessary
