Become Better Photographer: Keeping Colors Consistent with Gavin Hoey

Shooting against several color backdrops with the same outfit? You might need to watch out for how the same colors of the outfit translate against different backgrounds. Chances are, it will not be consistent which can create a real problem for both you and your client.

In this video photographer Gavin Hoey with Adorama TV is going to share three quick steps for getting color consistency in your photography workflow.

Step one.

Gavin states: ” Good color management starts right here inside of my small home office and it begins with a great monitor because if you’ve got a bad monitor, you’ll get no consistency. It makes it really hard and a good monitor makes life a lot easier.”

The monitor should  show at least 100 percent of the SRGB color space. That’s the smallest one photographers tend to use and is usually absolutely fine but if you’re a serious photographer get something like Gavin has – BenQ SW2700 that shows 99% of the Adobe RGB color space which is much bigger.

Every monitor needs to be calibrated. That means you get the very best out of the monitor. Mr. Hoey continues: “Now every month or there about’s, I’ll get myself this. This is little XRite i1 colorimeter and I’ll pop it on the screen and it will go through a series of color management steps to refine the color and get the very best out of this monitor. It does take a few minutes to go through so the best thing to do, is to let the monitor warm up, start this running and then you can go off and take some photos, which is exactly what I’m going to do right now.”

Step two.

Get the colors right in camera. If your model is wearing something of bright color and your background is also vivid or is lit by color gels, you need to set a custom white balance with a color checker passport. Use its gray side, lit by the same light that’s lighting the model. The process varies from camera to camera to set a custom white balance, so please refer to your camera’s manual.

Another option would be to shoot in RAW, so you  could do this later. However setting it in camera means that you can actually show the subject a picture that looks the right color and  it saves you a ton of time in post-processing, if you’ve got your colors roughly right at this stage and anything that saves time is a good idea.

Gavin also mentions – “Now it’s worth noting if you shoot with mirrorless cameras like my Olympus then the electronic viewfinder will probably show you the white balance you’ve just set, which is almost certainly the wrong color for the ambient light in the room. For example my video lights are a slightly different color to my flash, so when you’re looking through the viewfinder, don’t panic if the colors look a bit wrong just make sure they look good when you take the shots. “

Step three.

The third step of the process is all about image processing. For this step you would need to have at least one picture taken with color passport for reference.

After the shoot is done, it’s time to create a custom profile that matched the lighting, the camera and the lens used for the shoot.

There’s lots of ways to do it. According to Mr. Hoey  – “the first thing I need to do is actually go and get one of my RAW files and bring it into Photoshop because that’s the software I want to use to make my profile and do my edits. The RAW file that I have with the picture of the color checker passport  I need saved as a DNG file.

Then all I need to do to make my color profile is launch the color checker passport software and as it says drag and drop a DNG file there,

so I’ll drag and drop a DNG file and just wait for a few seconds, and it’s done! It’s all automated, it crops it, it finds the squares, it does absolutely everything.” 

Watch the full episode with Gavin Hoey and Adorama TV: