Pro White Balance Tip to Fix Beginner's Greatest Challenge!

Thank you, do you have any tips for white balance on mobile / iPhone photography ?

Great tips Mark! In applying these techniques, I find that I have to walk away from the image after moving the saturation slider back to neutral, to give my eyes a few minutes to adjust again, before finishing it off. I found your technique particularly useful in very colorful shots. Thank you!

Do you have a chance to shoot cloud in a detailed way, some photographers use long exposure to capture the landscapes and clouds, but it seems that not many really take a shoot of a cloud clearly with details. Any advice?

Are you creating a documentary recreation of a scene or is your goal to use color to contribute to the story within the images? Perhaps in the vein of cinematic LUT’s. Do you use barely perceptible subtlety or over the top garish? I guess the bottom line is what is your taste and the taste of your audience.

What we need is a digital equivalent to the Kodak grey card I used for film back in the day.

Mark, what kind of touchscreen tablet are you using? it doesnt look like a Wacom. Thanks!

Hey Mark, I have been shooting real estate photography full time for over four years now and my BIGGEST struggle has been the correct white balance. I was working on a shoot while watching this video and now I no longer have a problem. Used your method real time, right away. Your saturation solution is absolutely brilliant!!! Thank you so much for putting this out there. Cheers!

Pro White Balance in the title!! Careful there are thems that will be all woked up by that in this brave new world. 😂😂😂

What a great video, did some final adjustments to some of my photos that i am collating for a book, " black and white high key". What a difference, thank you

This is a very helpful tutorial about white balance. I've always left white balance alone, or "tweaked" it to suit the look I wanted. Since I've been using your system I've found things in my photographs that I haven't seen before. Just wanted to clarify one thing. Am I correct that you view the white balance as the "baseline" and colour grading as tweaking or finding a "look"?

Obviously respect your body of work but am surprised you would not have mentioned to include a neutral card in the shot and or using it to do a custom white balance. My experience is using video in underwater scenes, particularly in colder north pacific waters where colours are not at all what we think or even saw ( without a light on everything you look at in the daytime, the advantage of doing night diving ). Using adjusted white balance in that setting is an absolute must, and doing a shot on white fins and then doing a custom WB as well as using a colour checker. So, from that perspective, my thoughts have been to get it right first, because adjusting colours in post of those scenes will tear your hair out. Just my 2 deneiros. Enjoy your calm balanced and reasoned approach !

This isn't a bad idea. I've played with this method before. BE CAREFUL, however, because this will not be a good method in all RAW editors. Not all saturation sliders work the same. Some software's sliders for saturation are really closer to vibrancy, which does NOT boost all colors equally. I've recently been going straight to color curves for images that don't offer a convenient place to sample for white balance. Not as hard as I thought it would be.

Great tips, Mark - thanks for sharing!

Really useful tips! Thank you!

Thank you Mark you've been the best when it comes to editing tutorial

This is great video. I tried your instructions on some of my old photos that I haven't been happy with. Now I made them look a much better and more natural. The problem is that now I would like to edit all my old pictures again:) . Thanks a lot Mark

Thank you! I'm new to photography and editing, and white balance is something i've had trouble understanding.

Hi Mark thanks for sharing this video, I never seen your technique before as far as pushing the saturation up to 100%. I will try your technique and see how I go.

I like the saturation tip! I will definitely use this going forward. BTW how do you take those shots from these heights? Do you strap your camera to a drone? Private helicopter? Or are you just very tall?

Sorry Mark BUT: In that last photo with all the greens, not sure why you didn't try this, but, there are large areas of neutral grays up top in the foggy mist. And you'll realize this is so, because, even when you crank up the saturation with your technique, these areas actually persist in that neutral tone; i.e., they do not become altered in color! Could I respectfully suggest you try that and see what your result would be with the color picker for white balance. (As an aside, when picking out a neutral color for white balance, gray colors do much better than whites - in my experience.)

The other point I'd like to make is that your technique here is quite subjective. When you initially mention that this technique will give you a near perfect color balance, I assumed that there would be definitive steps in that process. But, after you've cranked up the saturation to 100%, you then proceed to change your color balance subjectively and completely visually, as in "I'll move this indicator to oh, 'about here'". This is totally subjective, and is not a "technique"! And indeed, the result, as I see it on my profiled monitor looks very unacceptable - although I do realize that you have not yet performed all of the rest of the alterations to that photo.


As you suggest in this video, color balance can be very tricky, and is subjective to a certain "artistic" degree, but if you're serious about accurate white balance the "technique" is to use a color checker card and during your photo shoot you take a photo of the card in the same sunlight as the photos you're shooting. However, I will caution you that even with this accurate technique, the colors will come out scientifically correct, but as you mention, they may not convey the correct atmosphere that you are trying to project in that photo.

And therein lies the "Art" of photography.

Thanks for a great tutorial!!! WB is always an art and you explained it well.

This is interesting, when I shoot images I use auto WB and change colors in post (Lightroom) by adjusting the HSL and also use split toning. However, I'm being forced to revert back to shooting jpegs and I can only use Photoshop Elements. Got any tips?

Omo the saturation trick is sooo useful ~ so glad I'm subscribed 😂

Excellent video. Adjusting white balance has always been one of my biggest challenges!

Avoid shaded areas for picking a white balance point, even if you know you've landed on a neutral grey. Shade is naturally cold.

Great job on the explanation of your workflow, you break down the particulars of the color casts to be considered so one can make good choices about which tool or tools to use and in what order to achieve visually pleasing results. What do you think about using the Tone Curve tool to control color cast? Each channel has its own color specialty along the tonal spectrum for more precise control.

Great tutorial! What are the two VHS tapes under your monitor? LOL

how come my white balance doesnt have all the options you were talking about that you could manually chose were the As shot button is. I have the most current LRC

like I do not have cloudy, daylight etc

I just color balanced a scene using the technique you demonstrated for the sail boat, it worked like a charm on my image. I am glad I saw your video. Thank you very mucho.

Good info!

How do you get the photo in the nav bar to pop out like that like that but can't find anything on it

Great tutorial!

Thanks!

Good stuff. For tricky scenes I have found a lot of success using the Arias method of yanking the temp wayyy to the left or right and then slowly working it back and forth towards a temp that looks good to me, then doing the same with tint. It's similar to the full saturation method. Seeing everything completely out of whack makes the right colors more apparent to the nekid eye.

great trick. I picked some my old picture and tried your method. it works brilliant to have consistency from picture to picture. Thanks!

Thanks Mark. A helpful video, and nice and gently presented too (as always). This may have already been raised in the hundreds of positive comments, but as you increase saturation, it’s often easy to see where colour channels separate in the histogram (we could see it on your screen!). It seems to me that part of achieving a good white balance is to bring those peaks closer together…

Mark and Nick…my dream photo teaching team!

thanks a bunch sir, this is so helpful, always find it hard to do white balance on a photo without "white" on it. As a beginner this is absolutely helping me, thank you

Thank you for the video. Very useful.

Very useful! I also struggled with white balance and it makes a lot of sense that the "correct" white balance is not necessarily what works best for a particular photo. Thank you!

very informative Mark

Dude, you look like Clancy Brown.
Everybody google it.

Any help in white-balancing VHS cassettes? Just kidding....!😁😄😃

So helpful! Thank you!

I have struggled getting great white balance for years. I've used all sorts of tools, paper, domes, cards. I constantly struggled with the color picker. Your technique is amazing, with a color calibrated monitor I feel like i can finally get a great balanced tone. Thank you!

Thank you Mark! Saving this one for future reference.

💥QUESTION: Which White Balance setting do you use in camera?