Getting “It” Right For Better Photographs: The original image

What do I mean by getting it right in the original image?

Back in the days of film you had to pay attention to lighting and the type of film you were using. Typically you’d use daylight balanced film. If you took pictures indoors with this film under tungsten light you’d get yellow images because of a light balance mismatch.

With digital imaging, your camera usually takes care of color balance for you. The only time you really run into trouble is if you program your camera to use a particular color balance and shoot in the jpeg format. That’s only one of the reasons I always shoot in the raw digital format! But, the multitude of reasons for this preference is really another topic - maybe we’ll talk about that later.

With most digital cameras you can set the color balance to something like “Natural”, “Portrait” or another color setting. This is okay if you shoot jpeg; but, if you shoot raw you might have noticed that the camera settings never get into Photoshop (or any other bitmap graphics editing program). That’s because they only affect jpeg images (as does the histogram on your camera display).

“But,” you say, “I want to shoot raw. And, I like those jpeg color settings and want to keep them!

Okay, you can do that (Adobe to the rescue!). Adobe has a free application called “Adobe DNG Profile Editor” that not only applies approximations of the built-in camera profiles, but also allows you to actually profile your camera using a widely available Macbeth ColorChecker card.
If you’re using Photoshop CS3 or CS4 or Lightroom 2, this capability is included. You might have to install the latest version of Adobe Camera Raw to access it. CS3 uses Camera Raw 4.5, CS4 uses Camera Raw 5.x. The DNG Profile Editor is available at the adobe.com web site.

http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/DNG_Profiles - Go to Downloads_and_Installation

What if you don’t have Photoshop CS3 or CS4, Lightroom 2 or you’re using another program that doesn’t recognize the latest Camera Raw? Well, all you have to do is to convert your camera’s raw files to the Adobe DNG format. DNG is a universal digital negative format developed by Adobe that, among other things, allows backward compatibility of new digital camera raw files with older versions of editing software. If you need to do this and your editing program doesn’t have the capability to convert, simply download the free Adobe DNG Converter and use that.

http://www.adobe.com/downloads/
Click on DNG Converter 5.5 update.

In Photoshop CS3 & CS4, the camera color calibration function can be found in the Camera Calibration Tab in Camera Raw. It’s under Camera Profile.

In Lightroom 2, it’s under Camera Calibration in the Develop Module. If you’re using Lr2, you can set up a preset so that you can apply a camera profile when you import your images.

One other thing you might want to do... this will make life a bit easier for you whether you do the calibration thing or not. Include a digital gray card in one of your images! Then you can use the white balance function to neutralize the colors of your image, no matter which program you’re using to edit your images.

Next time we’ll talk about calibrating and profiling your monitor. You do want to be sure that the colors you’re seeing represent the colors you think you’re seeing... don’t you?

You can add your comments and questions. I’ll be happy to answer them. The idea is to just enjoy and learn.

This and similar blogs may be found at thewhole9.com.

Chuck Behrman, a Los Angeles based advertising and fine art photographer, has been holding workshops in digital photography, Photoshop and Lightroom in the Los Angeles and Central Coast areas since 2004. You can see his images and learn about all his services at http://www.chbphoto.com