From the course: The Practicing Photographer

Seeing accurate white in images

Seeing accurate white in images

From the course: The Practicing Photographer

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Seeing accurate white in images

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- We talk a lot about developing your eye as you try to improve your photographic ability. But really a lot of the time what you're trying to do is to develop your brain because your brain is in large control over your visual sense and has a lot to do with what you see. I'm about to show you a picture and before we get into this whole exercise that we're about to do. I want to make the disclaimer that, this is a tricky one to pull off because I don't know what your monitor is like and we're having to run this print through our cameras which are being lit a particular way. I hoping that you're going to be able to see the difference between two images that I show you. We are possibly going to be showing you digital versions of these also. I'm going to show you this image This was shot by a high school student that I had earlier this Summer named Bobin Patell. Nice fun little bit of editing here. Obviously the chair originally had legs. The steering wheel was just a steering wheel that he found so he's edited the legs out to create this fun image. I printed it out then asked him what was wrong with it? He looked at it for a while. I'm going to ask you the same question. There's something incorrect about this image. So take a look at it for a moment and I'm going to give you a clue, it has to do with color. In particular an overall color cast. What color is that white door behind him? Is it white or is it maybe green? I would argue that it's green the problem is your brain is constantly trying to correct white so that it appears white. That's why you have to white balance your camera because under any kind of light your brain is going to do a great job of reproducing white but your camera has to be corrected to be able to make white look white under any kind of light. Take a look at this image. This is the same image that's been corrected in particular I'm looking at these white shades back here. Here they look white and you may find they looked white in the last image. Well but if I put these side by side, you can see the difference. Hopefully you can see the difference. Here this one looks markedly more green than this one does. Now when I put them side by side, this one starts to look a little magenta to me because magenta is opposite green on the color wheel. But mostly this looks white and this looks green to me but it was very difficult to spot in the original because my eye was correcting it for me. So I've printed enough images to be able to recognize this on screen and it just comes from practice. Until you get to that point and even after you get to that point you need to be very careful about your use of the histogram when you're dealing with any color image but particularly one that's got a lot of white in it. And what you can spot here is in your histogram you're going to see excess green hanging out the right side of the image in this case in areas that are this bright tone. This was a very easy image to correct. I simply went in with a levels adjustment layer and took the mid-tone dropper and clicked on something that I knew was supposed to be white or gray and that took the green cast out and gave me a correct image. The problem is not doing the correction the problem is recognizing the need for a correction in the first place. You can train your eye to see true white. You can train your eye to make up for what your brain is trying do to it. That takes time so in the meantime be very careful to work by the numbers, watch your histogram. Look for those green casts. If you are printing something with a lot of white in it and you're not sure, you think maybe there's some there, maybe there's not. Go ahead and try a correction, again take that mid-point dropper on a levels adjustment or if you're working with a raw file use your white balance dropper and click around on white and gray and see if you see the elimination of a color cast. You might find that white reveals itself if you ask it to. Until then your brain's going to be misguiding you into things that it thinks are white.

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