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Tech Talk for Content Creators: Color Basics and White Balancing your DSLR
A simple, 3-zone, calibration target, that can be folded and carried in the accompanying pouch.
Two of the most common problems I see when looking at web video produced by smaller, independent, content creators, are issues with sound and color correction. Both problems are easy to address, especially if you are shooting indoors in a controlled environment. I’ll get to sound at some other point, but for now, I want to talk about some color basics that starts with properly white balancing your camera and getting a standard color reference that you can use in your editing and/or color grading software.
As a photographer, there is nothing that saddens more than seeing a video where the flesh tones are off, values are clipped, or the blacks have been crushed to the point where the whole dynamic range of the scene is so compressed that most of the detail is going, and nothing looks good…Unless you’re shooting some kind of post-apocalyptic thriller and trying to convey the image of a nuclear winter. Even if you are shooting for something highly stylized, like a noir look, or emulating a bleach-bypass process, you need to start out with a good baseline color profile for whatever you are shooting. Shooting well exposed images with details across the entire dynamic range of your camera is essential…You can always lose detail later on, but you can’t put detail back into an image that was lost on set.
In the attached video, photography guru and master trainer, Rich Harrington of Rhed Pixel, and the new, and quite excellent, Power To Create podcast, shows how to set a custom white balance on a DSLR using a calibration target with white, gray, and black zones on it. As Rich explains, using a custom white balance with your DSLR can save you from a lot of issues down the road…You won’t have the problem of the AWB (Auto White Balance) drifting during the shoot if lighting conditions change, and you have a reference to use in your color correction software later on.
This is a good start to improving the quality of your color pipeline, but there is a bigger picture, one that starts with monitor calibration, and being able to insure that the colors that you saw during the shoot can be reproduced accurately on your monitor in studio. This is where the 3-zone calibration target reaches its limitations.
X-Rite Color Checker Passport.
During the video, Rich briefly flashes a device with a set of color tiles on it. This is a tool called a ‘Color Checker Passport’ from X-Rite, and is a part of a simple, yet powerful, system that can help any content creator improve the quality and consistency of their video color workflow.
It should be noted that there are many devices out there that can be used to achieve the same end results as the X-Rite product, in fact ColorChecker describes a specific standard for a set of color tiles used for profiling and reproducing color in photographic media…If you’d like a deeper dive on that, you can start with this Wikipedia article that talks about how the standard came about.
The Passport is a small device that opens into two sections; One section is a white balance target, and the other is a set of color tiles which, used in conjunction with a calibrated monitor, can match the color you saw on set to the color you see on screen. The Color Checker Passport also comes with software for creating camera profiles and other advanced tasks that are out of the scope of this conversation, save that they are very powerful. Just know that the color tiles are made to very exacting standards, guaranteeing that the colors on the tiles are exactly the colors that they are supposed to be (there is math involved.)
The White Balance Target section of the Color Checker Passport.
One of the reasons I prefer the X-Rite products is that they are part of an overall color management system that is relatively inexpensive, but simple and effective to use. The back end of this system is a monitor calibration system that insures that the color you are looking at on your display, or projector, is, from a scientific/technical point of view, tuned to a specific standard. I’ll get into that more in a future post, but for now let’s just say that if you calibrate your monitor using an X-Rite calibration device, such as the i1 Display Pro, or ColorMunki, you’ll know the display device is locked to a standard, and anyone in your production pipeline who calibrates their monitors to the same standard should be seeing the same colors on their display that you are seeing on yours. Mostly…
Did I mention that color is a very subjective science? Especially since nothing in nature is really in color, and our brains make up the colors in our head based on the wavelength of light being reflected off of the object, so no two people really ever see colors exactly the same way.
Anyway, back to the videography…
You can set your camera’s custom white balance using a 3-zone calibration target, as Rich Harrington uses in the video, or you can buy a similar target from X-Rite that is manufactured to a tighter set of standards for white, gray, and black…For web video you don’t have to get that scientific. I usually use the white balance card on the ColorChecker Passport…It’s just easier to carry around in a pocket.
The color tiles section of the ColorChecker Passport.
The next step is to capture the set of color tiles on the other side of the ColorChecker.
The bottom set of tiles is the set of colors that specifically defines what a ColorChecker (you may hear it referred to as a MacBeth chart by some folks…It was originally called the MacBeth ColorChecker), the 4×6 layout of colors, including a row of monochrome targets at the bottom. They are supplemented on the top section of the passport by an additional row of color tiles, two rows of white balance targets that are called warming tiles and cooling tiles (more on this in a minute, as they are pretty cool for doing quick look adjustments with your color tools), and a row of eight shades of monochrome targets from black to white.
There are a number of ways you can use this on set…Have your subject, or assistant camera if you’ve got a larger crew, hold them, or just tape this to the bottom of your slate. The important part is to have the tiles pointed slightly towards your main light source.
Now when you get into post, you can use these captured color charts in your NLE or color grading software to dial-in your color correction. Just use the technique Rich talks about in his video…Bring up whatever flavor of color-wheel tool your software has, and use the eye dropper to select your white and black points. Now with your white and black levels set, you can dial in to a basic color correction. Even if the overall color correction is going to be handled by your DP, an editor, or a colorist, making sure that your camera is white balanced, and color reference is recorded on set, will make the entire color management process easier for every department in your pipeline.
Now for the cool part. Remember the two roles of warming and cooling tiles on the upper part of the passport? These allow you make very subtle changes to the color temperature of the scene by either warming the overall tone of the scene, or making the colors cooler. This makes some basic stylization very easy.
If you’re a photographer and use Lightroom, or any of the Adobe projects, you can use the ColorChecker plugin to create DNG (Digital Negative—An Adobe-developed standard for an image container) profiles for your cameras, so that for any given set of color conditions (Daylight, Clouds, Tungsten (or Warm CFLs these days)), you can reproduce the same colors in photos from different cameras. Pretty cool, right?
Of course, all of this gets you to a starting point, and this post barely scratches the surface on color—the point here is not necessarily to make you, the content creator, a colorist, but to have an idea of what needs to happen during production to insure that your images are being recorded in a way that will make it easier for your editors and colorist to produce quality images. Being a good colorist is a highly specialized field, and there’s a reason that colorists are the highest paid artists in post—creating dramatic color effects takes time and experience, but by using a simple color management system such as the techniques described here, you can make the overall job of managing your color pipeline easier.
Here’s a tip on finishing graphics: I’ve seen quite a few shows where the creator has done a pretty good job of coming up with a distinctive look, but didn’t apply that look to the titles, graphics, and lower-thirds in the show. This is really noticeable in white titles where the white point is significantly different that the white point of the video, and the titles will be jarringly bright. Color correct your graphics into the scene, and your overall look will be much more consistent.
