How to keep Whites White in Green Woods???

[madisonofriel]

OK so I have a photoshoot coming up, with a bride and her husband (a sort of the wreck the dress kinda thing) In the woods where they got engaged. Well, I am a little concerned because the last time I shot white in the woods, it was extremely hard to keep them white. What I mean is the Greenery of the trees/ leaves / grass acts as a filter and makes every shadow GREEN.
I'm worried that even with a custom white balance it will still be green.
Any advice on how to overcome this?
Will my custom WB be enough or is there something else I can do (Before Post Processing) ?
Thanks for your help!
Below is a HORRID example.

 

[KmH]

Use supplemental lighting (flash) to fill the shadows with light the same color temperature as sunlight. (5500° K or so) light.

 

[tirediron]

Use supplemental lighting (flash) to fill the shadows with light the seam color temperature as sunlight. (5500° K or so) light.

Yep, this. Your example image would definitely have benefited from some fill light.

 

[Vtec44]

Cooler WB and add a bit of red to it. I shoot a lot in the forest 99% with natural light.

 

[Vtec44]

Here's a quick edit since I'm bored late at night.

The direction of the reflected light is important when shooting around a lot of green. They will cast a green cast because of the foliage. You don't want to have too much reflected light on them so don't place your subjects too close to green stuff.

Oops, removed image since you don't want yours to be edited.

 

[petrochemist]

I doubt it will be of any use to you but my favorite method is to shoot in IR - all the foliage becomes white

 

[KmH]

All light is natural light.
James just uses whatever ambient light is available.
Of course using the word 'natural' to describe ambient light gives it a nice marketing patina.

 

[unpopular]

fix it in post.

that said, your wb does look way too warm ... wb though is always a post-exposure correction. if you shoot raw then you should be able to fix this much.

so yeah. fix it in post.

 

[TCampbell]

OK so I have a photoshoot coming up, with a bride and her husband (a sort of the wreck the dress kinda thing) In the woods where they got engaged. Well, I am a little concerned because the last time I shot white in the woods, it was extremely hard to keep them white. What I mean is the Greenery of the trees/ leaves / grass acts as a filter and makes every shadow GREEN.
I'm worried that even with a custom white balance it will still be green.
Any advice on how to overcome this?
Will my custom WB be enough or is there something else I can do (Before Post Processing) ?
Thanks for your help!
Below is a HORRID example.

Do you own a "gray card"?

A gray card is simply a surface which is roughly a middle-gray tone (they vary) but the key part... is that they are guaranteed to be a true "neutral" gray (they have no color cast).

If you shoot JPEG, you take a photo of the gray card (in the identical light in which you intend to shoot your subjects) and use the camera's "custom white balance" and pick that shot of the gray card as your reference frame.

If you shoot RAW, you simply take a photo of the gray card in one frame (the subject can hold it for you -- it just needs to be lit by the same light that will be used to light your subject)... and then do the rest of the shoot. The images will have a horrible color cast, but the magic happens in post. If you use something like Lightroom, you use the white balance tool, pick the "gray card" as the color sample, and Lightroom now knows that this subject should have had an equal amount of red, green, and blue light... so it calculates how much of a color correction is needed to return the card to a "neutral" gray tone. That adjustment tells it how much color was in the light and it can now subtract that from the entire image -- so suddenly the entire image returns to perfect color. But the magic doesn't stop there... now you tell Lightroom to "sync" the white balance adjustment from that single frame... to the entire range of shots that were taken in the same light.

Each time you change location, the light changes, and you'll need to re-sample the gray card (either for custom white balance if shooting JPEG or to provide a new reference frame for white balance if you shoot RAW and plan to fix the color in post.)

The gray card can help you achieve a perfect white balance. Sometimes I don't want "perfect". I often want subjects to appear just fractionally "warm"... so I might bump the white balance slider to the "warm" direction by just a very very tiny amount after the software fixes the white balance.

 

[fmw]

fix it in post.

that said, your wb does look way too warm ... wb though is always a post-exposure correction. if you shoot raw then you should be able to fix this much.

so yeah. fix it in post.

The best answer. One quick click with the PS levels function fixes it perfectly.

 

[unpopular]

^^ no. not PS levels.

I mean. Yes. Well. Maybe.

One thing I really don't like about a lot of raw processors is that it's unclear what functions are pre-conversion, and what functions are post-conversion. AFAIK, many raw processors will do levels and curve after processing leaving only channel exposure.

And that's OK. But you have to be aware of this. If your image has a white balance issue, and you're shooting raw, then it is better to correct using the white balance slider in the raw processor, because this is done before conversion and the correction may be sufficiently severe to start drawing out noise and other artifacts.

It's also important to remember that white balance is *always* applied post-exposure. For someone who shoots raw, a greycard is simply something you do not need to worry about. The camera exposes everything in the middle of the range with a linear gamma. If you look at a raw file before ANY color correction and after interpolation, it's green and appears substantially under exposed. The amount of monkeying around that raw processors do to our images is pretty astounding, in fact I've found that under normal daylight white balance the raw processor pushes the red channel by over a stop and a half.

As great as a sensor that could attenuate gain at individual color components would be, that isn't how cameras work. Setting the white balance in your camera does nothing to the exposure, it only flags the raw data to compensate for the determined conditions. In the case of a jpeg, the camera sends this into it's onboard raw processor, and combined with 8-bit data, it's really essential that white balance is set properly. When shooting in raw, it conveniently moves the slider on your behalf.

Yep. That's it.

That's all it does.

But I guess I'm not saying throw away your grey card. White balance can be tricky to set without having a good reference and digital makes referencing white balance super easy. But I do think that it's really important that people understand what white balance is actually doing, and how it differs from something like curves and levels that are typically, afaik, applied after the raw file is processed.

 

[Ken McLoud]

if you've got to do it in camera and can't use lighting, I'd try pushing the exposure up to flirt with blowing out the whites.

this will, of course, change the look of the photo. It will also have the unfortunate side effect of making the deep forest greens appear more of a sickly yellow...so...

when in doubt, black and white!

 

[table1349]

when in doubt, black and white!

 

[tirediron]

when in doubt, black and white!

View attachment 124274

Shouldn't that be "Pawpalm"?

 

[table1349]

when in doubt, black and white!

View attachment 124274

Shouldn't that be "Pawpalm"?

Nooooo, the cat didn't Palm his paw, the cat palmed his FACE!