Poor Man’s Color Meter

January 9, 2007

Critical to making a quality photograph is having the correct settings on your camera. And while we used to only deal with shutter speed and aperture, digital brings us a new burden: white balance. When all the photojournalists in Utah went digital back around 2001, only one guy had a color meter. A color meter will tell you the exact temperature of the light and then you can simply dial it in on your camera for a perfect white balance and beautiful color. They also run you around 1,200 bucks, and that’s why only one guy had one.

Normally I’m shooting in RAW mode so I don’t have to worry about white balance; I just set it later on the computer. (With RAW photos, settings like white balance are adjusted later in software rather than in the camera.) But when I’m shooting sports, which entails hundreds of exposures being made, I don’t have the time or card space to shoot RAW. I have to go with JPEG files.

But to achieve the highest quality when shooting JPEG’s you must make sure your settings are perfect, especially white balance.

A lot of photographers are content with setting their white balance by shooting a photo of something white and setting the camera’s white to that image. It’s a good method when you’re short on time, but I’ve been doing things a little different. I’ll go through how I set a white balance at the Huntsman Center for a University of Utah basketball game the other night. Here’s my technique for the poor man’s color meter:

1. Shoot a RAW photo with some white in it.

2. Bring up the RAW photo on your computer in Adobe Camera Raw (PhotoShop).

3. Using the white balance tool…

…click on something white in your image.

ACR will now display the light temperature of your image on the Kelvin scale, in my case, 3,500 degrees. (You can get technical with the tint slider, but that’s for the advanced class.)