M A Andrew Black and White Photography Blog

You have probably looked around the web and seen images with fantastic clarity and colour fidelity and thought why don’t my images have the same vibrancy and colour rendition? Well chances are you need to follow a couple of basic steps. I use the word basic because I am deliberately avoiding recommending spending (too much) money on costly colour calibration tools. Anyone can get their colours in the right general area.

1) Calibrate your monitor with the tools you probably didn’t know you had installed.

Windows: If you own Photoshop 3 or later, you will probably don’t realise that it comes with a little utility called Adobe Gamma. Find this by doing a quick search and follow the on screen prompts. This should get your monitor displaying colours in the right ballpark.

Mac Users: Use the System Preferences–>Display—>Colours—> and Calibrate to fine tune Mac Colours.

2) Invest in a cheap ebay white balance lens cap.
These are available on ebay for about £1 GBP typically from Hong Kong. Some professionals will pour scorn over the quality of these but again they will get you in the right area colour wise. They are dead simple to use. Before shooting a scene, place over your lens, find your cameras white balance settings and choose custom white balance. Shoot the image with the lens cap on. (You might need to leave your lens in Manual focus mode to shoot). Once the white balance is captured successfully, you are good to carry on shooting.

3) Shoot Raw.
If your camera has a raw/jpg option, choose raw. Raw is like a digitial negative and allows you to make far more adjustments than a compressed JPG image. Professional photographers are shooting raw and with the cheap price of memory today (Raw files are larger), coupled with the speed of most modern computers (for editing raw files), you really have no excuse.

4) Make final adjustments in Photoshop/ Lightroom/ Image Editing
Sometimes, the white balance in a scene might need a little adjusting. Sometimes to true a white balance is not as aesthetically pleasing as you might want. Use a photo editor to adjust contrast and saturation. Hopefully, your shots should be free from colour casts!