Take and Make Great Photography with Gavin Hoey: Keeping colors consistent in your workflow

 

 

Unless you’re exclusively a black and white photographer, color is a critical part of your photography. It isn’t just about getting vibrant and rich colors either, it’s about maintaining accurate and consistent color throughout your entire photographic workflow. It’s much easier said than done. In the video below, photographer Gavin Hoey goes through a three-step approach for keeping your colors consistent from start to finish.

The first step happens before you even take a shot. You need to have a good monitor for processing your images. It doesn’t need to be expensive – there are a lot of very nice monitors for reasonable prices – but it does need to be able to be accurately calibrated. Further, you will want a monitor which can display at least 100 percent of the sRGB color space, although if you are really serious about your color, find a monitor which shows most of the Adobe RGB color space as well. Regarding calibration, you should be calibrating your monitor roughly every month to ensure that the brightness and color rendition is still at desired levels.

With your monitor calibrated, what can you do to capture good colors in camera? A custom white balance is a good start, particularly when you are working in a controlled environment where the temperature of the lights will be controllable, or at least reasonably consistent. To help you establish a proper custom white balance, you can use a color checker and hold it in the same light as you will be using in your images. The process for setting a custom white balance differs between cameras, so be sure to check your user manual if you’re unsure how to set a custom white balance on your personal camera. To see the third step in the process, watch Gavin Hoey’s video below.

(Via Adorama)