I am terrible at finding the correct look of early morning images. Here is one I took the other morning. I moved the sliders around to try to find a good wb. I used the dropper approach, clicking on several points. What do you think of the wb on this? If you want to download and give it a try feel free to do so and then repost, telling me what you did.
All help is appreciated.
Last edited by John Chardine; 01-01-2014 at 08:30 PM.
Reason: typos
Colors are rarely good coming into a RAW converter as it tries to preserve tonal information, often giving a flat look. In ACR/LR the first thing I usually do is go the the last tab, Camera Calibration, and look at the different Profiles. Then go back to the Basic tab and set tonalities for the lightest and darkest tones. That will change saturation, so then I look at the Temp and Tint sliders. No magic order here, it's just keep tweaking, usually starting with that looks like it needs the most help. Then you can go to Saturation, or Vibrance, and to the HSL tab for more tweaking.
My first impression here is that I'd like the sky to be more blue, and Vibrance might do that. But there is a limit to how much you can change the light you had.
Diane, Thanks for responding. I shoot in raw and I have been using LR for the past few weeks.
I will try your order of doing things - setting wb after 2 other steps, instead of doing wb first.
What do you think of the sand, rocks, snow on rocks?
I'd probably bring them up a little with a Curve, maybe just softly masked to that area. You wouldn't expect a lot of detail there, with the sun that low, but it's hard to know what looks plausible until you get the other things set.
Hi Allan- To me the WB looks fine for an early morning image. The "dropper" approach often does not work well in cases like this where you have very warm light. The warm light will make otherwise "neutral" tones look warm and that's what they should be. If you try to make a warm neutral tone, quantitatively neutral, you will make everything look very blue.
Allan, I've done a couple of quick curves, one to brighten the sky and a separate one to bring up the foreground. As you posted it, IMHO the white balance is fine for this time of day but the image is muddy. These types of shots can be difficult to get without the use of neutral grad filters or blended multiple exposures.
I have found with these types of photos that having one white balance for the sky (lets say daylight if you want more blues) and then finding a white balance that works for the foreground and blending them together (I do it in PS) can produce some pretty nice results. On the other hand it can produce some unrealistic results as well if you overdo it.
Need WB help
