Faces and White Balance

Faces and White Balance

First off I’d like to start by making it clear that white balance is a subject that can go on and on forever. So, I’m only going to write about white balance and faces, i.e. skin.

Properly white balanced skin is ‘usually’ very important, often critical, to a good or great shot. Unnatural skin colour looks, well, unnatural, and oft displeasing. There are three primary methods of controlling white balance, and there are times to break the rules and intentionally cause incorrect skin colour and tone.

When people look at other people, we don’t normally process how accurate their skin colour is. It’s kind of like an auto setting for processing their face. That is unless they have one of those horrible orange or bronze fake tans, which, well, you know. Speaking of bronze fake tans, they are a perfect example of how the mind eliminates the unnecessary while concentrating on what counts, which in the case of an obnoxious skin colour, the eyes cannot ignore something that is not natural, acceptable, and/or expected. In photography though, we notice inaccurate skin colour much, much more than in real life. A badly white balanced face can take even the greatest of shots and give it a very displeasing feel to it. Have you ever seen a pic of someone who was wearing way too much base and makeup, making their pale white neck clash with a brown skin tone on their face? Ick! How about a pic that you took under incandescent lights that made everything yellowish? Or an awesome moment at a concert you captured on your phone just to discover later that their face and skin were recorded as pure red, blue, or even worse, the dreaded Umpa Lumpa purple skin? Yuck to the third power!!!

There are three methods used to properly white balance skin colour and tones. There is the ‘usually’ trusty auto white balance that most people take for granted, manual white balance using a grey or white card, and of course software. Regardless of which method you use though, and often you’ll use the first and third methods above, if you don’t get close enough to an acceptable white balance to start with, you often won’t be able to get good skin colour after the fact, even in software.

Most of us now shoot with the first and most common method, auto white balance, and for the most part, modern auto-in-camera white balancing is absolutely marvelous and an amazing feat of technology. DSLRs today actually use an internal computer that compares a scene to tens or hundreds of thousands of stored images that you can’t view. Did you know that? In most situations, the camera does a miraculous job of finding a similar photo scene and decides which pic to use, and/or uses the overall present colours in the scene, for it’s colour balance settings. But, there are many situations where the camera either gets it wrong or it just can’t compensate for a solid/single colour scene.

The second method is using a grey card. Grey cards can be used in two ways. First, the easy way is to take a pic of a grey card (or even a true, pure white surface) and use software to set your correct white balance later. The other method is to take a pic of a grey card in manual white balance (check your specific camera’s manual on how to do this), which the camera then compares to a known perfect digital 18% grey and then uses the difference in RGB colour to offset the images you take with that custom setting. So if your light is slightly yellow, the white balance will add a little blue to the recorded image so that all those offset yellow tints equal back out to white. It works just like putting a coloured filter/gel on your camera flash, which we don’t really do anymore, but back in the film era (I’m showing my age, hehe), we had fluorescent and incandescent filters that changed the colour temperature to a correct white for those lighting conditions. Luckily our camera computer does most of the thinking for us now. Properly using a grey card is another post to come.

The third, and second easiest, method of controlling white balance is to use software. Rather, you’re actually not controlling it as in the two prior methods, but instead you’re correcting the recorded image. If you’re using Lightroom, Photoshop, and/or a multitude of other photo ‘editing’ programs, you have a few options to change white balance. One method is to use the software’s auto white balance, which is usually not the greatest solution since the image was already off to begin with. Another is to manually change your tint and hue sliders (way out of scope for this post), and the most common first step is to actually use a white balance tool in the software and go click on an area in the pic that you know or want to be pure white. Selecting an area that is supposed to be pure white is the best and easiest method to change the white balance in software, but sometimes, or rather all too often, there is no pure white area in the pic. When that happens, you pretty much have to manually choose the correct, or acceptable, settings via the manual method.

I know all of this seems a little complicated at times, it’s actually not. Since most of us don’t normally carry grey cards, we rely on auto white balance. But when that fails, don’t forget to learn that one simple tool in your software to help correct the problem. White balance is often critical, don’t take it for granted, especially when it is actually easy to handle.

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In this image of Tim Lindsey of Molly Hatchet, there is plenty of magenta and even a little blue along with some yellowish/orangish tinge around the face, but by white balancing between his white mustache and part of the face, the image feels correct.

Tim Lindsey of Molly Hatchet

Here’s an example of way too much magenta, but by getting at least a sliver of skin on the face correctly white balanced for skin tone the shot still works.

Rodney O’Quinn of the Pat Travers Band

Finally, this image of Ringo Starr was complicated by both magenta and blue stage lights, but again, white balancing for at least part of the face delivered a usable shot.

Ringo Starr