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Lesson Info

Calibration Q&A and Recap

question from the internet mona is wandering in regard to after wedding altar shots do try to color balance with a great card and then later used the passport to make the color better or would you just use the auto white balance and see the alter shots and then fix with the profile passport settings so I'll see if I understood that correctly but basically if I'm doing an altar shot in a catholic church I'm going to assume that it's lit by incandescent bulbs of some sort um and so it's really warm in there and the altar has you know spotlights coming down on it's stuff like that I'm not going to use um a auto white balance in there because at a white balance is going to fool the camera into thinking something that's not really there because it's too there's too much warmth probably and then I've got flashes that air kind of filling in and so what I'll do is I'll either choose the flash setting if if the flash is going to be the most amount of light that like that's what's really lightin...

g up the subjects I'll choose the flash setting which what that will do is it well because it's it's expecting blue daylight it's going to make the warm lights warmer if I choose to have a flash water white balance so my flashes will look normal and all of the incandescence will get warmer and that will be nice that'll be fine so I'll do that but then I'll just take one picture of this while I'm taking that picture so that if I get back and I find that that wasn't quite the right color balance this khun give me a much better accurate picture and not only can I take a picture like if I take a picture of this I can create its own profile teo to deal with the situation but I can also just go in and color drop these little gray panels here and the funny thing about this they've got this little section right here zoom in on this little section it's pretty awesome so that they've got the gray so this is pure black all the way to pure white right here but then here they've got these little settings where you can say okay do I want this to be a warmer or cooler shot and if you if you color drop this one it will make the shot warmer and if you color dropped this one over closer to the guy so it's like do you want the sun to be more in it for the and so you can click these and it will change the color balance to be warmer cooler based on these things because they're not actually gray they've got some color shift to him so it's like this is like a little pre set right here so and so you would just you literally go in so I'll take this and I could go zoom into these guys and see how they have like a little emblem here so this more son less human and then this one is more human less sun and so I can choose based on which one I want to use I just go to the basic area and grabbed the color picker and I can choose do I want it to be cooler or do I want it to be you know like what how do I want it to look so I choose a cooler one it turns warmer and I choose a warmer one it turns cooler so literally if you just take just have an assistant or or your subject hold this at the beginning of any shoe and take one picture in that light sources and you don't have to use it later but pretty handy I love these things and they fit in your pocket and I like feels like it's like my passport feel all official with it thank you so much for explaining that that your passport has brought up a lot of questions from the internet regarding the passport versus an expo disc um if you have a preference or if you can explain the difference okay I don't want to step on expo disc I don't want I don't want to disparage it I know people use it and I think great but the expo dis I assume we're talking about that thing you put over the lens and take a picture through it and then it and then you color balance based on that the problem with the expo disc and it's that's a great way to get on accurate white balance but because it's on ly giving you a gray it's it's giving you one gray screen it doesn't give you the same amount of information that this guy gives you this guy gives you all of the different colors so that the computer can go in and tweak all the colors independent of each other the expo this can't do that all its giving you is one grey sheet which is great for picking a great balance it's giving in basically what it's doing is it's giving you this it's giving you that right but I've got gray here and I've got gray on the other side here I've got great here so I'm getting the same effect here but I'm getting mohr information this is mohr information and it allows me to get a much more automated process going because of the calibrations you can't make a calibration often expo disgrace screen so so otherwise I mean for just white balancing that exploded was fine just put it over take a picture that's fine but it's not quite as accurate and it's not quite as time saving a technique as this would because this again is overarching I can take a picture of this and create a calibration that will last me for months and months and months because I can use it on everything right cause I can create a standard landscape setting or a standard portrait and it'll just last so you have a question from lloyd who asked do we need a monitor we need a monitor profile for different times of day when the brightness in your office changes okay here's my opinion on that if you are in a position where your monitor and your daylight changes in your office you're in the wrong office period my office has a problem too I have one window and the sun between depending on the time of year the sun kind of tips over the top of one roof and there's like a little courtyard and then it goes over the other roof so there's an hour and a half where the sun actually hits my window and I just don't work during that portion of the day or I do accounting right I do other things I don't work on photos because it changes the way my screen looks but no amount of adjustments or changes can really overcome that so it's just not worth it just it if you have a problem that you have to solve get blackout screens for your windows and when you're gonna work pull the blackout screens down work put the blackout screens back up just get rid of the variables itt's trying to fix it with some kind of wisdom and and hey that the culling monkey will actually read the ambient light trying to just it but no amount of adjustment can can change can can overcome those kind of of shifts so just get rid of the variables all right another question from the internet victoria from eugene oregon noticed you used adobe rgb I've been using s rgb and why do you choose adobe uh how did they notice that back in my camera oh here anyway well kudos to whoever noticed that that's um okay let me give you the hierarchy of color s rgb is like the eight crayon box it's got eight crowns that's it rgb is like the sixteen crayon box you know it's the one that's got two versions of blue and three versions of yellow and whatever and then pro photo rgb or raw that the raw source you know we're looking at things in raw there is no color profile for this it's not like we're working the space working in raw but the closest space that I can think of to is pro photo rgb the pro photo rg speed be space is like having a bucket of colors you know with like all the different skin tones and like the sharpener on the back you know the one that's like this big and it opens up and it's got like five or six boxes that's what pro photo rgb is so you can either have the eight crown box which is the rgb which is horrible or you can have the adobe nineteen ninety eight which is a much better crayon box or the pro photo rgb so when I work on a photo in light in in light room I'm just working on in raw which is everything it's it's the biggest color box you can have and then when I goto photo shop when I exported I'm exporting it so if I go to export this file I'm going to export it not as a j peg because there's a j peg I can still go toe pro photo rgb or nineteen eighty eight but I'm only eight bit technology so I don't have the agreement that's the two hundred fifty six tone's or colors so I goto psd and I choose a sixteen bit file and I go to pro photo rgb that's the best amount of information you can have its kind of like if you were to sand paint so if you have a box of sand and you're like shifting the sand around and whatever if you have a very thin amount of sand when you shift the sand you'll see the bottom of the box that's what happens when you start working on a j peg how many of you have worked on a j peg and you see banding in the skies or like right at the right at the place where the face goes in behind the hair and it starts to get a shadow it's like this line of like weird like stair steps down into the shadow that's because the j peg on ly has so much information and it's a it's a if it's an s r g b it's got even less information and so the second you start tweaking that file it starts breaking apart because it doesn't have any bit depth which is just like a really thin amount of sand when you're shifting it around in the box so what you really want to happen when you're when you're using an image in photo shop so when you're shifting pixels around you want that bit depth to be as deep as possible so that when your sand painting when you're moving sand around you don't hit the bottom of the box so pro photo rgb is the best color space tow edit in and then what happens is I'll go too photo shop and work on it and we'll do this on saturday we'll go from light room to photo shop work on it and then we'll come back to light room and then from light room that's where we'll disseminate the images to the web or to our friends or to facebook or whatever jared now we have a lot more questions coming up about that way talk about the difference of the settings in the camera vs exporting in light room or the setting versus the camera setting so so then that person is probably seeing the settings in rgb here ok so I work in when I when I create an rgb nineteen ninety eight j peg in my camera because you can choose both you can either go nineteen ninety eight rgb or you can go srg be in camera the problem with the rgb is it's not as good a file because it's crunch time or there's less there's less crayons in the box so the reason I go to nineteen ninety eight so that when I send it out toe light room say during a wedding and I'm doing a uh slide show my assistance going to come in and bring in all those rgb nineteen ninety eight images and we'll be able to adjust them and there'll be less breaking apart of the data because there's mme orbit death in there there's more information in the nineteen ninety eight color space than there is in the kgb so if I shot srg be my assistant when he adjusted him would get far more banding and weirdness in the skies and stuff like that so it's better to work on that nineteen ninety eight file so that's the reason we should because otherwise it wouldn't matter because there's no the raw image doesn't take s rgb or nineteen ninety it's neither of them it's just raw data so if I wasn't shooting j pegs at all then it wouldn't matter what I was on because in the end it's coming over here however remember I'm looking at a j peg on the back of the screen and if that j peg is an s rgb image it's going it's going to be more contrast e than rgb nineteen ninety eight and so I want the rgb nineteen eighty eight displaying here so that when I'm looking at it there it's maur equal to the raw so the closer I can get this file this j peg you noticed I turned off I've got on my on my picture styles have got zeros all the way across its neutral and the reason I wanted to be neutral is because I want to be the I want the j peg to be as close as it can possibly be to the raw which is almost impossible but I can get it close so I want otherwise I'm fooled by the back of the camera there are a ton of more questions but I wonder if you want to move on um no ask ask away okay I only have one more thing to cover before we finished so asked me another couple questions yes of course jumpin okay another from sam cocks in loveland colorado the rgb in camera choice affects only j peg files right rod is unaffected correct in fact in fact to further that point a lot of times I'll actually change my picture style to black and white so that the picture on the back of the camera is shown to me in black and white and I'll go around shooting black and white images during the wedding because when I look at it gives me an opportunity to pay attention to composition rather than colors plus as a bonus I can go up to the client and I could go so I I'm gonna I'm gonna do it right now so I'm I'm gonna turn this camera here picture style I'm going to go to monochrome so now this camera's whatever I take is going to be in black and white right the j peg will be but the raw is still color so now I can go to the client and aiken I'm just going to get a setting here that I like and better take off the lens cap because that's usually helpful right so I am going to take a picture here so I've got this photograph and I can um me play this turn off the info so there's the photograph right it's got a little blinky on it remember if I'm gonna show it to the client I've got to go to um turn off the enabled highlights there we go so I've got the photo so now I can go up to the client and say oh look well look at this picture I just shot up my shoe okay so I could go to the client now and say hey look at that photo but it's in black and white at the time I shot it and what happens is the client then gets in his head oh this guy's so brilliant he's choosing to choose black and white or color at the camera that's what's in his head so that later on when I show him a black and white image of this he doesn't think I have an option to turn it black to color he's looking at it and going oh yeah I remember he shot that in black and white so now I've given myself the ability to choose black and white or color in post and my client doesn't question it because they saw me working in black and white on my camera but really I had black and white the whole wedding I was shooting black and white the whole wedding right I can still shoot black and white the whole wedding like this and shoot black and white the whole wedding but I can still have my color rgb hissed a gram which is isn't that what I'm looking at that's the only thing I care about is my rgb hissed a gram but I can shoot the whole wedding in black and white so it doesn't matter what image I showed the client they see it in black and white and they think well this guy's choosing black and white on the fly and now I am free to do whatever I want with the images at the end and they'll think oh well if it was black and white he must have chosen it at the time it kind of gets you away from that like client coming to and saying can you turn this one back into color no it was black and white I mean and that's all you have to say and they go yeah I remember it was black and you're right it was in that then they're done and then they stop questioning you on that you show your pictures often like oh yeah I'll be shooting and if I see something I think is great to get their confidence level up I'll be like oh look at this cool image and they'll be like that's awesome and it gets them boosted up there like home and especially if you show it to like other groomsmen you take a cool picture and you're like oh look at this guys that was awesome you know especially of them doing something stupid like putting a beer box of beard over their head or something like that like I literally have that the other wedding skies takes one of the like a budweiser thing and puts it over his head so there's this beer box cardboard beer box over his head he's walking around but you take a picture of that you like all those so cool look at that he's all yeah this guy's awesome he takes pictures of me with a beer box over my head all right so yeah show show pictures as much as you can you know but if you if you turn it to black and white then they think you're actually making those decisions so take care of any color issues you might be having right they don't get to see a weird color issue but you khun that you're going to fix later or something yeah if you're getting some weird colors off something but the uh but the key is to that question then is you can actually turn your images to black and white at the camera but they're still color on the backside because it's wrong just make sure that you don't accidentally go in and turn your j peg settings the black and white and shoot a whole event on j peg because then they are black and white and that would be a bad deal so I warned you d photo in california's wondering it so when you export your photos due to goto a lab how do you export hm a couple people were wondering absolutely so you want to work on your photos in raw as long as humanly possible so I'm going to stay in light room as long as possible and that saturday we're going to really talk about that a lot how how far can we actually go in light room without ever leaving it that's what we want to do because in the raw space is where you're going to get the best color adjustments the best adjustments toe everything raw is better raw is better okay so if you can stay and raw as long as possible you'll have a much higher quality image then when you can't go any further and raw you go to photo shop and you go as a photo shop or a tiff sixteen bit pro photo rgb so that's his close to roz you khun get it do your editing their come backto light room and then out of light room that's when you spin off your little srg b j pegs srg b j pegs to me our print on ly documents they're not to be adjusted they're not to be tweaked they are for print they go to the printer and they get printed that's what they do if you're retouching j pegs if you're messing with j pegs you're just introducing opportunity for banding and weirdness okay I am thinking that you have not answered this question but I am going to ask it so um this is from our jones three fifteen is there a way to set light room so that it doesn't drop camera settings on in other words I should sepia and camera robert when I import to light room it drops all of my settings so is the question um he's setting stuff in his camera and then when he shoots it and it comes in the light room it drops the settings that's so the process of calibrating that we just went through of looking at the j peg and adjusting it to look like the j peg will solve that issue because whatever settings you have in your camera are on ly applied to the j peg preview that the camera raw image itself that the raw image has no idea what you did and it doesn't care it's just sending the raw data over to light room now you could use cannon software and cannon software knows what your your your settings are so if you go to cannons I don't even know what they call it but cannons version of camera raw or whatever if you go there it knows what settings were used inside of your j peg previews options it knows and it tries to adjust for that a little bit but it's the slowest worst program ever so it's it wouldn't be worth that to deal with it so instead what you do is you calibrate light room to know how to adjust your raw to match that j peg settings that's it and if you had multiple j peg settings on your camera that you went back and forth between you'd have to create two or three different preset calibrations toe to bring him in and then instead of instead of allowing it just to do automatically on the way in through a calibration what you would end up doing is telling it to do it through a preset so when you went to import something you would simply have a siri's of what I call global presets and those global presets you would choose them and say ok I want all of these images to remove the magenta in the face or I want all of these to be adobe standard I want all these to be processed two thousand twelve version so these are things that I'm adding to an image on the way in like a bulk set of images and so then if you knew so well on this set I wanted to do this type of thing to my images because I I shot him all black and white well if you if you intended the whole shoot to be black and white you shot him with a monochrome setting with contrast then you should create a matching profile in here through a pre set and then you would just choose okay when I'm bringing these in I want them to be I'd go to my black and white settings I want them to be uh sayin a type with warm paper and so if I did that then every image that came in would the default would come in it would read the default and then it would convert it to black and white and add a scion a type with a warm paper underneath it and do all the and then when you brought it in he would have this whole new type of thing so that's important the understanding the value of a preset can't be understated because presets are going to save you so much time whether or not you purchased them from someone or whether you made your own presets the ability to look in and him tto have all of your images that air coming in you know if whatever that image is going to look like if you wanted all your image is to have you know this uh if you want it all your images to turn to black and white and add sayin a type if that's what you wanted to happen to your images you shouldn't have to even click that you should be able to do on import but if you're in the images and you're working on the images and you want something to be done to your image is doing it here makes no sense you'll notice that throughout this entire three days the amount of times that I will adjust things here and here is very minimal I'll do a little bit of work up here and then I'll push a bunch of these because there's no point in adjusting these when I can create presets to do it for me like I said don't don't do anything that a computer could do for you you said you have three presets what are those three presents you said you used three different process when you import or three different so no I have three basic calibration chris and in the profiles I have three at home I have three of these what are they I have a portrait like a standard light portrait so like if I'm doing something like we did today I have one for a studio type sitting and then I have one that's ah for shade and sun and then I have one for no no lights like bankston inside that kind of stuff so three those pretty much cover every circumstance I'm going to be in I mean they're going to be outside in the shade or in the sun I'm going to be in a studio shooting with studio lights or I'm going to be documenting something in tungsten light and any time I go into like a sodium vapor lit place or something black and white you know it's just probably light so I'll just do a black and white generally way have about twelve minutes do you have any more from me just say this just to recap what we've been talking about so the point of this segment was to discuss the need for automation so no matter what you do in life automation is going to save you for instance one of the chief things that has saved your life and done wonders for what you do and made your life possible is the fact that we have power plants have you ever thought about that like a power plant what is a power plant do for you it allows youto have a computer it allows you to use a microwave it allows you to turn on an oven anytime you want to it allows you to heat your home to cool your home it allows youto charge of a car even if you want to drive aa battery operated car like all of that stuff can be done and you don't have to think about all you have to do is pay a power company to live power to you that's amazing but that's the sheer process of automation and allowing someone in a centralized location to create power and deliver it to you the fact that you can afford a car is based on the fact that the automation exists otherwise it would be too expensive to own a car would be too expensive to own anything if it was always made by hand so automation is what makes your life possible the fact that you can have a pen in your hand that clicks you know this pen here if I had to have someone make this by hand it would be unaffordable but because millions of them are made in an automated factory I have the ability to buy him for you know a buck apiece or fifty cents apiece or less right so automation is everything well in your business you've got to get automated and that's what this whole calibration thing is about this calibration thing isn't about quality it provides quality but it's about saving time and it's about being quick all throughout this morning we talked about lighting concepts and we talked about basic flash technology and putting flashes here and there but that's not what we're we're really talking about we're talking about is being quick and efficient about everything you do using the least amount of equipment in the simplest way for the quickest results because your time is your money that's you you have a limited amount of time and you need to do it quickly and then when you bring things into the computer you need to do it in a quick fashion the reason we selected in light room was not because light room is the absolute best selection program for dealing with clients I think there's a couple out there that are pretty wiz bang great programs toe to review images with clients but the waste of time between getting it from the camera in delight room than out to that program to do the selection and back in the light room and make the you're just wasting a lot of time even if it's not your time if it's an assistance time that assistant could be blogging for you there's so many more important things that could be done with your time and with your assistance time and your staff's time if you could automate things and so that's why we selected light room and that's why when we important toe light room we try and create custom profiles from the color checker and and that's why we automate are that's why we make sure that our calibrate er calibrates our monitor that's why we make sure that we calibrate this camera in the back of our screen so that looks the same as what we see in light room so that at every step along the way we cut out a cz many repetitive tasks as we can and then another things once we get into light room who start working you'd better have presets you gotta have presets over here if you're using the tools like these brush tools and you're using the grady in tool you'd better have a list of pre sets here too because if you don't have pre sets that you're using to create all these slider movements that's minutes and seconds and hours of your life that you're just wasting and if you don't have well designed and organized presets over here you're wasting more time so these air important presets or not something just to create fun looks they are time savers that's the point so and that's why I make him because I'm pretty anal about saving time so that's why they exist and camera defaults that we created here are huge make your camera defaults because that will save me more time than you could possibly imagine that's it any other questions um let's see I mean we could we could get into some more technical questions but we have about five more minutes you want to just go ahead and do what you give me two questions and then we'll okay don't you have any final questions for the day now is your chance let's see here um there's still really asking about the sergey v it's very complicated let me let me just let me just say it this way and hopefully this will quell all issues srg b in the camera doesn't matter if you're shooting raw because you still going to be raw and s r g b is going to just be completely divorced from the situation once it's raw so you don't really have to worry about whether it's s rgb or nineteen ninety eight in the camera I prefer nineteen ninety eight so it looks a little bit more like the robber but it doesn't matter if you're shooting raw it's going to come here and it's not gonna matter the key to understand is that the on ly time an image should be s rgb after it comes into raw is at the final j peg printable version that's it and it needs to be srg via at that point but that's the on ly time you never work on an image in srg be it is not a good idea don't do it as our g b j pegs are bad period that s r j b e e all right ending question for the day is from alex mcclure jared should I leave my files raw or should I convert too dmg on imports okay I love d angie's but don't do him on in port because it takes more time to bring them in um I just bring them in raw and then once I've selected and gotten rid of the the reject portions and I've I'm keeping the keepers then I will turn all of them to dmg because the dmg file type is fantastic all the settings are inside of it all of the key words all the adjustments and so I can literally go to my just to my desktop and search in the spotlight and say I want a grand canyon photograph and you're going to see if I go grand canyon let's go wedding there see that little dmg right there just showed up so I don't even need light room to find my d n g so if you want your raw images to be I found from anywhere all you have to do is type in all that if you keyword um and stuff like that the dmg has all that information in it so even if it's not part of light room I can find it as long as that hard drive is connected I confined the dmg but if it if it's a raw raw doesn't contain any of that information so I can't I can't find it that way it would would show me an ex mp file if I had made it but the day angie is fantastic so convert to the n g a t the end I don't necessarily need toe import emma's deon geez I don't see that as important