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Image Quality: Exposure and Color Balance

let's talk about image quality and let's talk of I'm just going to go to an image say this one it's a good starting image here it's it's taken on location in hawaii I was just you know just a weird looking landscape and the reason I pull up this image is I want to talk about what we call a hist a gram everybody knows what this diagram is right you see one of these on the back your camera and you also see one here in light room so the instagrams right over here and we're going to talk about the concept of image quality image quality is very very much dependent on that history graham so what we see here is a pile of white and that's all here up in the sky and over here we see a pile of of of shadows and that's that stuff here like this little shadow here in that shadow on that shadow there and then you see the mid tones here and that's all of this you know grass out here and some of the trees and then you see a little bit of the kind of there's very little in the kind of mid light greys ...

it's either pretty bright or pretty dark and a little bit in the center but there's very little middle right but you'll notice that as you come over to the left hand side this little mountain of blacks and drops off before it hits the edge and the same thing happens over here on the right hand side this little mountain of whites drops off before it hits the edge so this is what we would call a perfectly exposed image because there's nothing too dark for the camera and nothing too light for the camera to deal with and you don't get that very often especially a fear in phoenix because in phoenix we have bright sun all the time and so you have deep shadows and super bright highlights and sometimes you don't have the latitude that's called latitude how much you can fit into this box and you don't sometimes don't have the latitude and so your shadows if you keep your shadows in your highlights will fall off this edge and clip or you keep the highlights and over here on the left hand side the shadows will fall off and clip so that latitude is very important and over the past ten years digital camera makers have spent a lot of time with megapixels and not enough time with latitude latitude is far more important then your megapixels you can go out and buy you know than thirty megapixel camera the forty megapixel camera but if you don't have latitude it's of no value to sew a chip with a lot of latitude is more important to you than a chip with a lot of mega pixels so we're going to teach you how to look at that latitude and try and get the latitude you need to try and get all of that information in because if something clips off here on the shadows what do you get you get banding you've seen that those so if I were to take an image let me just go to say uh I got to find a raw image here okay okay so if I'm in the developed module and I'm looking at this image here and I zoom in say to these shadows over here okay so watch what happens if I try and get the schatzi the shadows here in this mountain watch what happens if I try and over expose that do you see the lines that are starting to occur and all the noise that's happening that is what we call um digital noise or banding and that digital noise and banding occurs because you're taking something that doesn't really exist so it's an interesting thing about your chip on your camera your chip on your camera records less information in shadows mohr information and highlights it's really just a function of energy remember we talked about light is science and it's just energy coming in and hitting this chip so when you have something that's bright that's a lot of energy that's a lot of light coming in and burning the chip or burning the film back in the film days so that light is hitting the lighter areas here in the photograph those lighter areas they're getting a lot more energy hitting the chip so it's recording mohr information whereas in the shadows there's very little energy coming into hating the chip so it's getting very little information and so in the shadows your chip is recording uh if if you were to divide the hist a gram up into say fifths so if you were to just say one two three four others has four let's let's say force if you were to take this section of the photograph here that section of the photograph in the shadows which is all of this stuff we turn off this before after our image this area here on in my whole sorry okay so in my history ram you can see that most of this is darker stuff right so this area here in the darker areas is on ly getting about one hundred and some odd difference tones or different colors inside of the shadows but when you go up to the highlights the highlights because there's so much energy coming in and recording on the chip you're actually getting about two thousand tones in the highlights so you have more information and mohr tones being recorded in your highlights up here and you have less tones and less information being recorded in the shadows so if that's the case where do you want to record your information in the highlights and that's why when you look at a image if you see the highlight it looks all smooth and it's perfectly exposed and then if you look at the shadows where do you find the noise you find the noise in the shadows don't you the reason you find the noise in the shadows and because there's not a lot of information being recorded there and if you have to over exposed the image to draw out the information in the shadows then you're increasing the amount of noise you're basically the what what the camera are what right here we're fine we like the image as it's as it shone we like it that way and we like all the shadows so as long as we leave the shadows where they're supposed to be their fine but once I start to try and bring those shadows up if I underexposed my image poorly I poorly expose it so it's under exposed then I'm going to I'm basically multiplying the noise so what I want to do then is I want to shoot the image correctly so they don't have to push it around too much people who have toe over expose their images by two or more stops are always gonna have a lot of noise in those shadows because they're multiplying that noise remember there's not much information in those tones so when we talk then about shooting on our camera we're going to want to move as much information to the highlights as possible we we want to exposed as brightly as possible because we'll get the most information and the most quality out of our image if we expose as bright as possible but do we ever want to clip you wouldn't want that highlight on that cloud to clip because then you just have a white blob right and those kinds are beautiful they're absolutely beautiful and you can see that that's where the cloud is that little tiny for those on the audience I'm gonna move my mouse over there on the internet right there that little tiny bit of of highlight is this cloud and it's gorgeous that cloud is absolutely beautiful it's got all this beautiful information and see how it just it's it's perfectly exposed beautiful cloud but it's just that little bit of information and if I were toe overexpose this thing then I would go I would have just have a white piece of paper there's nothing beautiful about that all right so we don't want to clip but we don't want under expose so then the question is which is more important okay now did any of you ever shoot film yeah did you play with playing with it okay so in film the mantra was that you would protect your shadows because if you under exposed your image it would just be blank film and so you'd have nothing well the truth is that that issue has reversed now in digital we have to protect the highlight because the highlight once it clips we've got nothing so there's there's three channels red green and blue they're coming in right rgb so those three channels are being recorded and those three channels and you can see here a lot more different colors but basically there's your red there's your green and there's your blue and as they as they overlap they create yellow and magenta and all those other colors but the red green and blue are your three specific channels and there's some number between zero and two fifty five on each one of them and you have a scale so you have a scale on each one of them and if all three of those hit two fifty five nothing exists it's all white and there is no information whatsoever now some of you have seen the ability to recover right so you see an image and you're like oh I over exposed that and you're going to recover it that's because the only reason you can recover is because those three numbers have not hit two fifty five one of them is off one of them is it like two fifty three or something like that so it has a little bit of information in there so it can it can kind of fudge the numbers and pretend that it's got it all right so if but once they've hit two fifty five all three of those numbers you're done you're absolutely done and there is no way to bring something back so it's more important that we protect our highlight and so when we're shooting today you're going to see that I'm going to always be protecting the highlight and that sometimes means that I under exposed something to protect the highlight but because I'm protecting that highlight I will have to bring the shadow up but that's better than completely losing the highlight right okay so quality is important but you have to understand that history ram to get the quality the quality or image is completely based in that history graham and you're going to get a better quality you're better off shooting an image at thirty two hundred s o and getting exposed exposing it correctly then you aren't shooting a image of one hundred s o and exposing it poorly so add the grain increase your your um s o and get the exposure correct at the camera and you're going to get a better shot than if you're messing around and trying to draw up stuff that doesn't really exist I'm so we will talk about that I shoot a lot of stuff at sixteen hundred eight hundred thirty two hundred like I rarely shoot it one hundred and that's the native on the can the cannons native sl is one hundred eyes so and I could count on one hand how many times in the last couple months I've shot at I s o one hundred even when I'm in the studio and I have lights I'm often times at two hundred so I've very rarely shoot at one hundred s so it's at least especially with like the mark three cameras and that whole generation of cameras the esso is less important than anything else so so the question is as far as I am understanding is so if I'm inside and I'm shooting uh let's go to this one this is my son a long time ago um jackson suit such a q t um so if I'm inside and I've got orange tungsten light is that gonna affect or change the black and white it will to some degree because all color is going to determine how much so if you're looking at this image this is a color image obviously it was shot in color but you're seeing in black and white when I take the temperature and change it you will notice that his face is going to change see that so as I increase the temperature or decrease the temp pitcher different parts of his face start to show differently and that's because certain portions of his face have different colors on them so if I intensify the orange and he's got orange on his face that portion of his face is going to get brighter because the image itself is getting it so if we turn this the color you can see there's a lot of orange in there so this side of the images orange because tungsten light is coming from within the house but this side is less orange because there's blue light coming from outside right and remember the tungsten light is cold and the stuff outside is actually hot light coming in and that's why it's blue and so if I were to get this properly color balanced you can see that now that's properly balanced there and it's kind of warm inside and when I turn it to black and white you're going to see whatever you see you're going to see that but then once you start messing with that if I go back to color and I really pump up the orange then I go to black and white and you can see that it's changed over on this side so I'm now dropback wallets and see that see how we it's disappearing on this side because I'm d intensifying is that a word d intensifying I just made it up if not so um I'm pulling down the warmth of his face and so it's getting darker because there's less brightness to the color so as we take the temperature up though we get more information in there so yes what years what you're photographing and the color of the light you're photographing and then the color balance of that will definitely change the way the black and white image looks in the end so jordan we have a couple questions about latitude okay from new jersey would like tio get a better explanation of what latitude our people seem confused and df w two from dallas said is latitude and dynamic range the same thing yes absolutely excuse me absolutely latitude and dynamic range are pretty much the same idea so when you talk about a high dynamic range photograph where you take like three images and then you sandwich him together and one's underexposed one's normal and one's over exposed what you're doing is trying to increase the size of your history ram basically so that you can actually so if you have a photograph where the history graham is not big enough for the latitude of information so you've got super bright sun and you got super dark shadows all in the same photograph and you're trying to photograph all of that together you can't get it inside of one exposure so you do three exposures so that you can see all sides of that that curve or tone in total information that would fit into this diagram and so when you're dealing with that you take three photographs sandwich them together and then work on him right so high dynamic range photography is just trying to increase the size of that latitude the amount of information you could get in so latitude is simply this how latitude is the distance between black and white and can you fit it into whatever container you have which is artist a gram so your latitude is some cameras have more latitude and some have less like I my my first camera was a kanan uh ten d that was my first digital can't well actually my first digital cameras ah nikon d one x but boy those cameras had no latitude whatsoever and so even this even something that wasn't very contrast e on those cameras blew out the highlights or lost the shadows because there wasn't enough latitude distance between black and white in recording on that camera but now the camera's today or so has so much latitude that you khun on almost any general scene you khun generally get the highlights in a manageable situation and the shadows will generally be okay occasionally it gets a little beyond the latitude and that's where we fill with flash and stuff so uh any other questions about latitude to any other that's good okay so let's talk then about color balance so this is a great photograph for that too because if we take it and we let's just do it as shot so there's as shot and you can see that and I think this was shot on I generally shoot on aida auto white balance because the cameras today are pretty good at it figuring out what a white balance and knowing what to do but you can see the camera got a pretty good job here getting the light coming from outside but it treats it as white it's not trying to show the light outside is blue light it's trying to show you can see from this camera from this shot that when a camera without a white balance looks at something it's looking at it and it's basically going to make its determination on white balance based on the brightest light source not on the weakest light source so because there's mohr energy and light coming from the window it's going to balance itself based on blue light based on that outdoor light and so you see that this side of my son's face is warm because it balanced for the outdoor light because the outdoor light happened to be brighter than the indoor light so it takes whatever the most energy is that's what it focuses on and so if I want then teo if I want to balance it for the indoor light as I cool it down so that it's balanced for the indoor light so that this is normal looking then suddenly see how we're getting this is blue coming in on the other side so then there's that delicate balance is too well which do we want do we want blue light to be the normal and that we make that the normal looking light and then everything else becomes warm or do we want the light inside to be normal and then all of a sudden the stuff that's coming from outside looks blue and that choice that you make is going to determine remember light does and light is so light here does color him blew on one side and yellow on the other side but what is the light doing like what what what's the effect of the light if I choose to normalize the indoor yellow light then the light coming from outside seems cold and it seems like a wind torri day and it seems maybe not quite as happy seems more like depressing right but if I balance for the light outdoor and make the light outdoor my my the light that I'm going to focus on so that it's now kind of normalized now the indoor light becomes warm and what do we get out of that now we get cozy and warm and snuggle in a blanket and cute and happy right simply by the choice that we make in the color of light were using so it's very important at the photo shoot even to make good decisions on what you're the color of the light you're going to see and what your white balance is going to be based on is important because it changes the way people see the photograph and how they feel when they're looking at the photograph do they feel cold do they feel warm those air very important things let me go back to my grid here I'm going to go to who does senior portrait you do right so I have done a quite a few senior portrait's over the past um over the fast past year and so I'm gonna pull in a couple of photographs here and we're gonna look at some of these um so let me just look for this favorites here okay so this was an interesting photo shoot that we took this piano out into a little wooded area and photographed the girls because they're they're really big into music and and uh but but particularly of interest to me was this photograph here so this girl's really into music and so she's I'm gonna look at the raw image here you see that so there's a lot of warmth in this photograph so when you look at this photograph I could have photographed it with a some kind of ah gel to cool the warm but the sun and your flash are the same temperature they're both blue light the flashes is dialed in to be about the same temperature as the sun which means that if you use the sun and a flash together they will look the same so if it's all going to be warm it's all warm so notice that she's warm back here the sunlight back here is warm and then her face is also warm right and so if I cool it off all of them get cool together and if I warming up all of them get warm together if I use mixed light sources like I was with my son then suddenly I'm getting those problems where which one do I focus on do I get the blue light or the warm light and right now light color and itself could be a good contrast though so if I wanted this light back here tio seem even warmer what would I do I'll have to do is put a blue gel on my flash and then when I warm up the front to be warm this will be even warmer because the sun is going to look maur warm than a blue than a light with a blue uh gel on it okay so we could make decisions at the camera that would take this to be even warmer if I chose to do that but instead it's all going to be warm because your flash and your son are the same temperature um when you go to uh this this photo shoots good example hold on could you repeat that again about using the filter okay well I'll show you um so in this instance here okay so now what's happening is in in this photograph here I guess I better point here so that the audience can see it so I have the sun is setting the sun's over here to the right hand side but it's kind of dipped below the horizon pretty much so it's just barely dropped so this light that you're seeing here is not the sun it's a flash and then on the other side because now it's the other side is just blue it's it's more bluish light coming from the empty northern north north eastern sky it's it's reflected light so it's bluer and so what happens is this gets a little cooler on this side of the face and this gets a little warmer on this side of the face because now I have very bluish light and then on this side I have a flash that pretends to be the sun which is a little bit more intense and warmer and so we we end up with a mixed color situation when we're shooting out in the open because now we're dealing with two different colors because the sun changes temperature as it moves it gets warmer as it gets down to the horizon and goes through dust and smog and stuff like that which is really beautiful light so as the sun drops on the horizon you get warmer warmer warmer light and softer light but the other side of the horizon so the opposite side where the sun isn't becomes cooler and cooler and cooler so it gets bluer and bluer and bluer while the sun side gets warmer and warmer and warmer color wise right but it's actually the opposite an actual temperature so just just so that we can all stay confused by the difference in life so um so when I'm shooting this photograph I'm going to feel much warmer on this side than I am on this side because this side is all you know blue bluish looking light coming from the northern sky and this is that warmer light coming from a warm sun that's just dropped on the horizon and a flash that is kind of a brighter more noonday sun temperature okay let's see any questions yes always questions um quick question from photo photo by tree so when you say a flash is warm you don't mean warm kelvin and calvin do you well okay so let's talk about calvin's everybody know what a kelvin is it's a temperature of light so kelvin's as they go up in scale so if you're at twenty seven hundred kelvin's that is not very hot temperature wise it's cold light but it looks warm that's what you would see like an edison bulb is down in the twenty seven twenty three twenty five hundred kelvin's it's low right and then as you go up that kelvin scale it gets hotter light that there's more energy in it but it looks bluer so the sun is way up it like fifty eight and it's up there sixty six thousand those that's the sun up in that arrange and so that's why the son looks so that the light coming from the sun coming indoors goingto look bluer because it's hot time so when you compare sunlight too incandescent bulbs incandescent bulbs are low on that kelvin scale so they're low they like twenty seven hundred calvin's and then the sun is way up here in the six thousand range and so you've got like this discrepancy this is blue light it's hot light but it's blue this is cold light but it's orange that makes sense okay any other questions about kelvin's air temperatures or actually there is one okay wants me to make two eighty three is wondering which color temperature holds the most information we'll remember the hotter the light is the more energy you have and so that energy that's coming in is clearly going to give you the chip more it's goingto energize the chip more but I wouldn't worry too much about that because in the end as long as you're balancing for the color that you're shooting and you're getting a proper exposure the chips going to read that well now there is an instance if you were if you were shooting in say incandescent light and you put your color balance on outdoor light you're going to be recording the wrong color and so it's not going to do is good a job getting really pristine color as if you had correctly assigned the right white balance so if your indoor and you're using incandescent bulbs then you want to be white balancing for incandescent because then it's going to match the correct color and you get the right exposure you're going toe much cleaner non noisy file than if you end up doing the opposite and I know everybody says oh well I'm shooting raw so I could just choose later but if you really mess it up if you really don't pay attention to your white balance at all and you go outside and you shoot incandescent white balance outside you're going to get a far noisier and bad file then you will if you shot outdoor settings for outdoor now that being said otto white balance does a great job taking care of it so I leave otto white balance on all the time the only time I ever go into ah an actual specific white balance is when there's a tricky situation that that my camera's obviously being fooled so like uh one example is I was shooting the wedding and they had this um cake and they someone I don't know if you did this but there was a red light coming down on the cake like there was just this red almost like the chicken that that warms your chicken it like the fast food restaurant it was like that and it was coming down on the cake and I would look at that cake I couldn't tell what color it wass because the red light was obviously so read that I couldn't tell the color I was I would put my just couldn't figure it out staring at I brought my assistant over can you tell what color that cake is no couldn't tell the on ly way we could tell was we took a great card we put the gray card in front of the cake we filled the frame of the great card with the camera took a picture of the great card white balance to the great card and then took another picture of the cake and then we could see it was a yellow cake but it was on ly after doing all of that that we could tell it was a yellow cake there is no way everybody in the audience saw that as a red like gross looking ugly cake I have no idea what this is a nice place I just don't know what they were doing but there was this red glowing cake so so if I'm in a tricky situation like that or if I'm in a studio where I know the light's not gonna change then I'll specifically dial in another place to use white balance is when you're in theatre situations if you're photographing theatrical stuff those lights that I mean they're they're doing red lights and green lights and blue lights and that your camera will go uh is this I don't know what it is because there's so many colors of light and it will always get it wrong so what you do is you go in and you actually die elin because it's never one of those settings it's never like incandescent and it's never you know fluorescent it's always somewhere in between so what you do is you just take a picture and dialling the kelvin's and usually it's somewhere around like twenty two or twenty three hundred kelvin's is something like that is usually what I find works in most theater situations but it's all over the board but you just you take a picture with a certain kelvin and see and it doesn't look like what you're looking at if not dial a different kellen just warm it up and cool it down until you've dialed in the right kelvin for that and then shoot away and then everything will look perfect throughout the entire session but if you're in auto white bones in a theatrical situation it's just going to mess it up so in those instances you should dial in your your white balance but if you're just on normal weddings or outdoor photoshoots are moving around taking pictures unless your light is staying exactly the same in studio I would leave it on white otto white balance because the worst thing is is that if I'm switching white balance from shadow shade toe highlight our tow shade to sun toe whatever I'll always forget and then I'll go into the next situation and take a picture and then all of a sudden I've got post production work to do because the auto white balance wasn't on so otto I balance is my best friend yes so you have answered several people's questions in the chat room asking about multiple light sources on lee sum there's been some shoot um and fino chris had asked with mixed light sources do you ever adjust the color temperature in different parts of the image separately in post yes oh how okay so that's a let's go back to my son here so let me uh occasionally when you're shooting a wedding or you're on the fly and you take a shot and you don't have to say you're not lighting like I didn't like this this literally is window here and a piece of white board here so like I just grabbed like a sixteen by twenty piece of white foam core and had my older son hold it right there that's it that's the whole lighting situation but you've got this beautiful light here there's a little rembrandt looking light thing going on right there and then but that white foam board is bouncing a little bit of light back so that this doesn't get lost in complete darkness and that's it that's the whole lighting situation um but in this case you got cold light coming here and warm light coming here so if you have no options and you you can't fix it with lighting or putting gels on lights or anything like that and you want to fix it here then you're going to use this ask radiant tool the grady and tools my favorite friend I just grab it I'm going I can change the temperature so I go to tempt so I'm changing the temperature and now you can see that I can cool it down or I can warm it up so the question is where do I balance so if I want to balance this thing I'll first go to the temperature and balance is such that I like that what I'm seeing so let's let's get his face on the left hand side so I like the warmth in his face right here but I don't like how cool it is on this side so now I'll take the grady in't tool and I'll warm it up by bringing the temperature up and then I'll grab from this side of the frame where the blue light is coming from and grab it and drag this way and now what's gonna happen is this is going to be warmer and it's going to get less and less warm is it ghost here and then by the time it hits this side it's zero percent warming okay and so now I khun increase the temperature or aiken decrease that see how I could change how that light's coming in so now instead of having this this uh shade here looking kind of greenish it now warms up like it normally and that's the true color of that drapery and now his face is getting warm on this side as it comes in and I can change how quickly the grady int you know if I go to hear he really gets warm and if I pull out this way he just gets a little bit of warm so you can you can because of the the light that's coming from the window is going to be bluer as it gets closer to the window and it's going to get less and less blue as it comes into the room and that's what the grade ian's doing the grating is just taking the opposite it's if it's blue over here it's starting really warm and then it's getting less and less warm as it comes in the room and it kind of negates the blue there's a great thing to do when you have your your shooting inside of ah room that has like a tuscan brown wall right and you bounce your flash off there so you get this nice pleasing light coming across but it's too warm and then this side is too blue because you just warmed it up intensely because of that tuscan wall all you gotta do is come back in the light room and grab a blue grady in and just drag it from the tuscan wall over and it'll just get its blue or by the tuscan wall and as it comes in it gets less and less blue and it will just completely negate the warmth that came from the wall time so there are ways to handle it in post but your preference would be able to take care of it in in your uh in your shot rather than in post because post always takes more time but there is that they're over the last ten years there's been too much of ah of a willingness to fix it in post oh well just photoshopped that later soon as you hear that you're like oh that's going to cost me that is going to cost me so much time and money because someone wants to fix it and photo shop later you know just fix it now if the ties messed up or the flowers you know drooping or whatever fix it now so that you don't have to fix it later so it's easier to fix it at the shot than it is to fix it in photo shop guaranteed so obviously all all of this topic we could go really deep in it yeah no there's and there is there's a lot there's a lot we could discuss when it comes to exposure and latitude and color balance and stuff but the important thing to understand is that your your latitude is the quality of your image and whether or not you expose it correctly and whether or not you put it in the right color balance is what's going to determine how how much quality you have in any given portion of your photograph the shadows the highlights etcetera did someone have a question I'm really confused when you say that home guys is actually cool can you go over that concept again yeah okay so the question is theirs and this is always confusing for anybody warm light is cool like cool it is warm light that the basic concept is this if you think of that candle the hottest part of the flame is always closest to the fuel which is the wick and the that blue light if you look at that candle it's blue but that's the hottest part of the flame of the most energy exists in that portion and then the flame cools off as it goes up but at the tip of the flame it's warm looking it's it's yellow right and we think of yellow is warm and blue is cold you know like if I said I'm cold right now and you took a picture of me you would if you cast it blew I would feel cold because we think of arctic you know blue right cold right and then we think of warm fire blankets you know cozy so this is a prime example of how light is and like does two different things all right so light itself is actually blue when it's hot but we think of it as cold when it's blue so any time you see blue light that's because there's more energy there's that's actually hotter light but we think of it it makes us feel colder because it's blue because the that the color blue tow us says cold even though it's actually the opposite of that so it's just it's you know what photography is opposite land think about that like for instance your app peter your aperture has a really small hole and it's f twenty two and then a really wide hole is f one point two totally opposite land like why is that it's just the opposite and if you think about shutter speeds right so it's actually open longer on the smaller numbers so when it's it's one half right it's open for a long time and then all of a sudden when it's like two thousand it's open for a short time and so do you think of the number when you first learned photography or like what so the two thousand is is actually faster and the one is shorter like you know so and then when you looked at the after and then when you increase the aperture then you have to decrease the shutter to keep the exposure of the same right that whole when you're going back and forth to try and balance your exposures all of its opposite so if you think about photography everything's opposite and that's true for the color too color of light is opposite when you when you see blue light it's actually hotter light even though it makes you feel colder so you just have to think about that when you just think about that flame yeah how how does land lady put doug however that kinds have to lay into everything well the way that you're the color that you shoot will relate to your post production is can you get the color at the photograph correct enough at the start so that you don't have to fix it in post that's where it relates it's the same ideas exposure if you don't get the exposure right at the photograph then you have to deal with post oh but if you can expose it correctly then you have less post well if you can get the color balance right you have less post but also just in concept of bataan murphy if you understand what people think when they feel when they see warm light versus cold light or blue light versus yellow light you will change the effect you have on people by understanding what the light is telling them and that's why we talked about at the very beginning about that concept of what is light do and what is it so how does it make you feel that's a big thing and if you khun while you're shooting if you can think about how do I expose it and what kind of color of light should I be using in order to make this feel a certain way that will change the way people look at the photograph and that will only benefit benefit you in the long run to postproduction aside you bet uh palo photos wondering what's your best guess on how you would shoot a cool and warm scene in camera to avoid post production is it to split the difference well I'll give you two answers to that if I have no flashes have no lighting ability have no reflectors or anything like that then I'm just going to um if it's super super intense like lots of blue on the side of lots of warm on this side I'm going toe I'm gonna shoot to negate the blue because warm light is more pleasing than cold light so very few instances where I've looked at an image and thought that it looked really good if it looked blue you know is all blue and cold ish because most people skin looks better when it's warm most people's you know hair looks better when everything with sunsets looked better than their arm there's very few things that look better when they're cold there are blue right and so generally I will then correct for the blue light and I will allow the warm to become warmer generally but if I have any way to correct it sam photographing someone and there's a lot of warmth coming in from this side and a lot of cool coming in from this side so got yellow are yellow light coming here and blue light coming here if I have a reflector then I'll take that reflector and I'll reflect either silver light or you know those reflectors that have like the half gold or the full gold you can go into the other side and just reflects on that light off of a warm surface and it will warm the other side up or if I have a flash then I could take a flash and just add either a warm gel to the side that looks blue or I can add a blue gel to the side that looks two yellow and aiken I can change it that way just by adding a light that has a gel on it and we'll talk about gels those air really important any camera any flashback you have should have gels inside that bag you know I'm gels you need to get some so I think we have another question in studio audience I was about a gold reflector um I have one I never use it so like sunset would be a good time to reflect the right but at sunset the sun is already warm and if you use a gold reflector it'll over warm it up and so instead of using that you can turn it to the silver and the silver is going to reflect the gold that's coming from the sun and it would just give you the same amount but a little less because it's kind of cooling it down on that silver reflection and it's it's weaker because it's bouncing but yeah so but usually you use the gold when they're it's not sunset it's full day and you just need to warm up some the shadow or something like that because the shadows always colder shadows always colder until sunset comes and at sunset the shouter start to get warm because there's reflected light coming around in them okay this question kind of goes back to the beginning ok we have a question from ken taylor photo who is from cornwall ontario and can ask jared to use a light meter or judge off the back here camera also ties into jason lopez's question can you explain proper exposure I'm not sure how best to tell okay so after the break we'll actually start talking about proper exposure but the quick answer to the first question is I very rarely use the light meter anymore when I was shooting film I always use light meter had literally on my belt loop and I would use it constantly um but now because I'm a experienced enough that I kind of know what the exposure's going to be so I can walk into a circumstance say okay I think the exposure's going to be this and then I'll take the picture but I don't judge the picture I don't I don't look at a photograph the for me the back of the screen is not to look at the composition in my photograph so I always keep it on the info version that gives me the full history ram information because that's what I'm interested in so when I take a picture I want the history graham not the picture I don't want to see the picture I want to see the history gram that's all I care about in fact I wish that an info section that would just give you a history graham just get rid of the picture I don't need the picture I just need the hist a gram tell me what the history ma'am looks like and I can tell you whether I have properly exposed I don't need to see the picture I saw the picture when I took it right I composed it I don't need to see that I'm not doing my selecting process in my camera I just need that history um so you always need to know that his scram open we'll we'll show that really intensely on this next segment so that question will get answered in in depth so great to hear a couple people are wondering if you could explain on dh show the grady in't again how to just yeah so in this photograph if we go back to the grady in and let's just reset this grady in't so it doesn't exist anymore andi you really have to pay attention tio I don't know how well you see it on the internet but and it's even hard to see here but all over extend it so this is the photo without the grady in the first thing that you want to do is color balance it for the one side or the other so you could color balance it so you it's really it's the way you like it here warm and then on this side it's going to be a little bit too warm or in my way I will do it is all color balance it so that I like the left side of his face so that I'm color bouncing for that the tunks and light and now I've got a blueish face on this side because the light that's coming in from the skylight is is blue because it's sunlight which is in the higher kelvin's right so it's blue so what I'm gonna do is go to the grady int and I am going to see I've negated all of these options I'm not changing exposure the contrast the highlights any of that all I'm doing is adding warmth in the grady int now I'm going to actually take the exposure way down so that you can see what the grady is doing a little bit better when I click on this area soon as I click that's one hundred percent of whatever I've done so the negative exposure on the warming up of the temperature is at one hundred percent right where I click and as I drag it's going to zero percent so that the area on the left hand side is zero percent so this is one hundred percent of the burn and the temperature change and this is zero percent of the burn and the temperature change and it just moves as a slow grady and this is fifty percent right here and so it's warming the light most here and less here and it's just crossing over his face and now I couldn't you know of course change how much that exposure is doing and see how by the time it gets to his face it's not doing a lot of work but it's just warming it up a little bit and I can change this see how you cooling and warming up the light you can see it most on his sleeve so it gets cooler and warmer so that's how the great aunt works trying on any photograph where you're in front of you've got someone next to a window that's going to be blue light coming in and warm light coming from the inside and it just works wonders to negate either the warmth or the or the blue light depending you just do the opposite color what remember we're on opposite land and so we do whatever the opposite is so if it's blue light put warm on there and drag it across