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White balance ethics

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You'll need it if you every want to sell your landscape photography. Because you are putting yourself at a tremendous competitive disadvantage.

I don't know ANY landscape photographers who refuse to use high-contrast / high saturation film or digital manipulation, refuse to use a polarizing filter, refuse to use a graduated ND filter, etc.

--
my favorite work: http://www.pbase.com/sdaconsulting/favorite_work
 
If you want wrongly recorded colors as with film without filters (generally photographers used to use or still use color correcting filters as well as film balanced for other light situations) you can simply switch to daylight white balance.

With digital at least you can now have all the options and you can choose how you want to reproduce an image just like with film but a lot easier.

As for your 'ethics' question photography never had an never will reproduce a scene properly. This is pretty much impossible. What do you base the comparison on, your eyes, my eyes, a video camera or what ? Photography just is not a real reproduction of a real life scene. there is shutter speed, aperture and motion and other things that influence the capture in a way that it will never properly reproduce the scene in a still picture.

--
Michael Salzlechner
StarZen Digital Imaging
http://www.starzen.com/imaging
 
ib1yysguy said:
First of all- you dont make color mistakes with film.

Secondly, I dont take my film to the lab.

Third, what I meant by film reading colors correctly was that the
silver crystals would read "consistantly" (i suppose thats a better
word for it). If your in the daylight it would read about right.
That's what it's balanced for. If your inside it would read yellow
or green. That color that the crystals are reading is in fact the
actual color of the light. Your eyes dont precieve it as well as
the film but you can still tell if you try. Walk out side on a dark
night and look into a brightly lit shop window. You'll notice that
it looks more green than normal.

Anyway, I'm just looking for consistancy with my digital images.
Making a white shirt look white isn't always right. If your
standing next to a lamp that white shirt is going to look yellow to
the eye but when you set your camera to tunsten wb. it will make it
read artifically white.
--
Al
Set low goals and you'll never be disapointed.
Click to expand...
At last, I understand your situation. You have been shooting daylight film in all situations and processing it with the basic settings used for daylight exposures - no white balance adjustments beyond what is normally used to get a correct daylight exposure. Your life could not be simpler in the digital realm. Just leave the camera set for daylight. Let the pixels fall where they may. You will consistently get your green faces under flourescents and red faces under tungsten. No problem.

Best regards,
Jonathan
--
It's all good, but some stuff is better.
 
No worries there. As I stated in my original post, I'm a photo journalist - not a fine arts photographer. If I was taking landscapes I wouldn't care about how accurate my images are. Journalism is another question entirely.

--
Al
Set low goals and you'll never be disapointed.
 
... and that's my problem. CCD doesn't react like film does so how can you mantain consistancy the way you can with film.

I dont think you can. Ger Bee had an idea. Set it to the flash wb. and just go with it. I gave that a shot and it seems to work pretty well.

Maybe when nikon makes a full frame chip it'll have better exposure lattidutde and dynamic range.
--
Al
Set low goals and you'll never be disapointed.
 
Al,

I can drive less than 30 minutes and look across the Hudson River to where the World Trade Towers stood. So in this area, you can be sure we saw more newspaper photos of the disaster than any place else on the planet.

Do you think every one of them was 100% untouched? And do you think that even knowing that such an image was altered for white balance or dodged or burned or color correction had any impact on the power of the image or an adverse effect on the viewer?

Frankly, my feeling is the image can get altered more by how it's cropped in the newspaper than basic digital prep work (as opposed to digital manipulation, ie, moving objects, etc.)

I understand you may feel conflicted and I don't think anyone is challanging the reality of how you personally feel. But I think the general popluation feels the photo journalist has the responsiblity to pull detail out of the shadows of an image if it will help tell the story more accurately. And as color is more and more common in newspapers, they expect that color to help them understand the story.
 
ib1yysguy said:
Maybe when nikon makes a full frame chip it'll have better exposure
lattidutde and dynamic range.
Click to expand...
One of the really great advantages to digital will be latitude. Most people are only looking at pixel resolution and pixel noise vs film. Those are overtaking film right now, but latitude will be next. Eventually we will be able to have latitude equal and greater than the eye can perceive which will be awesome since it will eliminate the necessity to bracket photos which is already a hassle in 6Mpix RAW let alone future 24Mpix. Unfortunately latitude is no where near as big a marketing buzz word as resolution so I doubt much R&D money is going towards it so it will probably be a while before significant progress is made. Canon will probably have it before Nikon however. I only say that because I own Canon. :)

--
Mark Rogers
http://www.pbase.com/lila161
 
ib1yysguy said:
Ever since I've started shooting digital for my nespaper I havn't
been able to sleep at night. Going to bed with a guilty conscience
that is; knowing I mislead the public every day in order to satisfy
our newsprint reproduction manager. Here's my problem:

With film colors reproduce exactly as they appear in real life.
With digital you can alter the colors your camera outputs by
setting the white balance to different temperatures. What's the
best way to reproduce accurate colors? Ethically you can't brighten
up a photo and saturate the colors to make the scene look better
(not in journalism anyway). My job is to reproduce that one would
have seen if they had been there themselves. National Geographic,
for instance, only allows their photographers to alter colors
slightly (ie, contrast and color correction)... but if you dont
make your skin tones to the right CMYK numbers you get hounded by
the prepress department to do so to make the paper more beautiful.
What's a guy to do? If a guy's standing under a blue light, they
look blue... and therefore should be printed as blue in the paper.

Can you just set a neutral white balance temperature in one
situation (say a flash bounced off the roof of an all white room)
and use that in all instances to make your CCD react to color like
film or does the CCD see light differently than film. Help me out
here, please.
--
Al
Set low goals and you'll never be disapointed.
Click to expand...
--Is it the Pro Digital Talk???
Mikael
 
Relax, this is not a question of Ethics. You are trying to get the colors and exposure as close as you can not trying to change history. Do the best job that you can and that is all that you can do. Tomorrows newspaper will be in the bottom of a bird cage so try your best and get on with the next assignment.
ib1yysguy said:
Ever since I've started shooting digital for my nespaper I havn't
been able to sleep at night. Going to bed with a guilty conscience
that is; knowing I mislead the public every day in order to satisfy
our newsprint reproduction manager. Here's my problem:

With film colors reproduce exactly as they appear in real life.
With digital you can alter the colors your camera outputs by
setting the white balance to different temperatures. What's the
best way to reproduce accurate colors? Ethically you can't brighten
up a photo and saturate the colors to make the scene look better
(not in journalism anyway). My job is to reproduce that one would
have seen if they had been there themselves. National Geographic,
for instance, only allows their photographers to alter colors
slightly (ie, contrast and color correction)... but if you dont
make your skin tones to the right CMYK numbers you get hounded by
the prepress department to do so to make the paper more beautiful.
What's a guy to do? If a guy's standing under a blue light, they
look blue... and therefore should be printed as blue in the paper.

Can you just set a neutral white balance temperature in one
situation (say a flash bounced off the roof of an all white room)
and use that in all instances to make your CCD react to color like
film or does the CCD see light differently than film. Help me out
here, please.
--
Al
Set low goals and you'll never be disapointed.
Click to expand...
 
Consider the fact that color (and white, for that matter) are relative to the individual viewer. A sample of the general population shown a "white" sample will describe it as slightly pink, blue, green, tan, or white.

We (the professionals) are all used to a specific viewpoint, based largely on our experience. But even amongst us, the ones who are supposed to really know, a sample viewed by a group of us under controlled conditions will yeild varying descriptions.
Eyes, experience, and perception are different.

Throw in looking at the newspaper under various conditions (daylight, tungsten, etc.) and all bets are off.
--
jdoyle
 
Many people have already discussed the issues of perception and different films so I will leave that area alone.

However the other side of this issue that I haven't seen mentioned is the ability of newsprint to reproduce the image accurately. You seem to be spending a lot of time worrying about the white balance and the accuracy of color at capture and no mention of the problems trying to reproduce this on a sponge.

In an Ideal world you would capture your image as accurately as possible in RGB and the image would be output to a High Quality Substrate that is bright white and with pure CMY inks or dyes. This does not and will not happen so we have to comprise and make adjustments. The first compromise we do is add Black to the printing process to compensate for the fact that we do not have Pure CMY inks or dyes. Next, in your case (not so much for National Geo) we compromise and print on a paper that is light grey to yellow and has a high dot gain of around 25-30%.

What does this mean? For starters your whites are never going to be white. At best the specular highlight in the printed image is going to tbe he color of the substrate (in this case grey or yellow) and the highlight will be neutral but far from white. Secondly because of the nature of CMYK printing the gamut of colors that we have to work with is small. Then you are printing on newsprint which makes that gamut even smaller. Realisticly your printed image on newsprint has maybe 10000 colors in it and a latitude of maybe 4.5 stops if you have everything going your way. All of this assumes ideal conditions with CMYK inks on the highest quality newsprint you can find. Compare these numbers to what you camera captures and you soon realize that newsprint is not capable of reproducing the image 100% accurately. Shadows will block up or highlights will blow out. Reds, Blues and Greens will look muddy at best. None of this even deals with some of the more complex issues of weather the newspaper is actually printing with CMYK. Some papers will use Red instead of Magenta to make headlines pop. And then of course we get into the issue of Cold or Heatset.

My point here is that you need not lose sleep over the issue of white balance. News Photography has never been about 100% accurate reproduction of the scene. It is about conveying the feeling and power of the scence as quickly and efficently as possible. Remember the most important part of being a news photographer is "F8 and be there".

I appreciate your pride in your work and suggest that you use the tools at your disposal to color correct the image as best as possible to convey the feeling of the situation.
 
Our newspaper cares so much about reproduction yet does nothing (on the photography end) to help it. We win repo. contests all the time yet we NEVER calibrate our monitors between tweek to press so what we see is never what we get. It's a silly way of running a business but I guess they know best (... right).
--
Al
Set low goals and you'll never be disapointed.
 
worrying about the white balance
Leaf_Fan said:
and the accuracy of color at capture and no mention of the problems
trying to reproduce this on a sponge.
Click to expand...
Leaf_Fan said:
I appreciate your pride in your work and suggest that you use the
tools at your disposal to color correct the image as best as
possible to convey the feeling of the situation.
Click to expand...
OK, now we're getting rolling!

First, enough about the limitations of the process, I'll stipulate that, but I still think journalists have a ethical obligation to reproduce the scene as closely as possible within the limitations of the medium . OK? Enough about technical limitations, I think we all agree about the existence of limits!

But the real clue to my point is in the last line about "convey the feeling" of the situation,

THE FEELING? THE FEELING? Journalisim is not supposed to be about FEELINGS, it's supposed to be about FACTS and the accurate representation thereof. One individual's FEELINGS about an event may be very different than anothers FEELINGS about the same event. A great example of this would be a anti-abortion rally. One photographer who is "pro choice" might see the rally as an affront to his/her legal rights, and another advance for a fascist state trying to waylay the constitution for religious reasons. Another photographer who is a deacon at his/her local Catholic parish will likely FEEL very different about the very same rally.

Without a dedication to truth and FACTS, that is, an ethical obligation , these events would be strongly influenced by the FEELINGS of the reporter, and not necessarily convey the objective facts of the event. The objective representation of these facts require a dedication to craft that will manifest itself in deliberate actions like accurate focus, reasonable focal lengths to represent reasonable scale and size/proximity relationships, and lighting that attempts to accurately record the scene without improper emotional "coloring".

I'll grant you, this thread has changed direction a little, but I like to think it has evolved to a very interesting discussion.

Thanks to everyone participating, and thanks to ib1yysguy for opening this Pandora's box.

p
--
http://www.paulmbowers.com
 
I agree with Paul. When we can say that accuracy is the best we can do " within the limitations of the medium " (which means "per x person's perception"), all we are left with is defining "best" (the specifications of the perception).

Of course, now we have to talk about perseption. Like the photos of the people holding the really large fish they have caught. Since the photo is two-dimensional, anything closer to the camera looks larger relative to the same size object in the background. If we can tell the relative distance, we can account for the "misrepresentation", but when we can't, we just know it doesn't "look right." In neither case can we tell the relative size of the closer (or farther) object unless we have something with which to compare in the photo.

I have a totally "unmanipulated" photo of my wife holding the Cape Hatteras lighthouse in her hands. One hand is on top of the lighthouse, the other underneath. Anyone looking at the photo believes they photo is a hoax, but they can see no proof of it in the photo. They "believe" it is a hoax solely because it doesn't look right.

If we can make something look "right", I guess we have accuracy, even though what is represented is a lie.
 
Al,

No disrespect intended, but if the problem that keeps you up at night is worrying about misleading the public with an incorrect white balance, you lead a charmed life ;-).

I find it interesting that you refer to National Geographic as a baseline for photographic integrity, the same folks that moved a pyramid on their cover to come up with a more pleasing image. Even a cursory look at Geographic shows photographs that have been enhanced by the photographer by using colored gels on their lights and other ways to help tell the story. Just last issue they had a photograph of a camp scene in the Sahara desert lit with a flashlight. The photographer used tungsten film and correction filters, which is no different than setting a custom white balance digitally, either pre or post processing.

You define your job as "to reproduce that one would have seen if they had been there themselves". Who? If five people were there, they would have seen five different versions of reality. Their personalities and life expericences would make some notice what others may not have even seen. I think your job description is a smidge idealistic. Having worked for a large newspaper conglomorate (Knight Ridder), I'd venture to say you job is more likely to create an image that will attract readers and boost circulation, as well as reasonably capture the sitruation before you.

Also, I think you're shortchanging the brain's role in setting a "custom white balance". You may be correct in a small way to say we've learned to compensate for different lighting (when I was a commercial photographer, I could walk in a room and tell you what king of fluorescent tubes were being used), but the fact remains that the public compensates all the time. I'm sure you could take two prints, one color corrected and one more technically correct and show them to an average reader and most would describe the technically correct one as looking "funny". Your reproduction manager may merely be trying to keep folks from picking up the paper and saying "what's wrong with them, can't they even get the colors right?".

I'm also very curious how long you've been a PJ and what your paper's circulation is. Again, no offense, but your musings sound closer to conversations held over a beer after PJ class than concerns expressed by someone who's been in the field for ten years.

Happy New Year,
Doug
 
Since they have the ability to drastically alter images simply by the amount of ink they lay down, your printers will determine what looks best coming off of the press.

Besides, if I look at a stack of newspapers, the printed photo on the top can look completely different than the bottom copy. It's cheap ink on cheap paper, printed a very high speed.

Of the two seconds I spend looking at newspaper photos, I'm usually happy if the color photo is in register ; )

Give yourself a break. You have integrity, but unfortunately, it's not just about you.

Regards
ib1yysguy said:
Our newspaper cares so much about reproduction yet does nothing (on
the photography end) to help it. We win repo. contests all the time
yet we NEVER calibrate our monitors between tweek to press so what
we see is never what we get. It's a silly way of running a
business but I guess they know best (... right).
--
Al
Set low goals and you'll never be disapointed.
Click to expand...
 
Doug MacMillan said:
I find it interesting that you refer to National Geographic as a
baseline for photographic integrity, the same folks that moved a
pyramid on their cover to come up with a more pleasing image.
Click to expand...
This was done over twenty years ago, right as digitally altering images was just becoming a posability and the ethics behind it hadn't been fully established I'm sure. They later renounced their decision to do so and have done their best to make sure the reader knows when an image has been altered (so they claim in this year's january issue).
Doug MacMillan said:
You define your job as "to reproduce that one would have seen if
they had been there themselves".
Click to expand...
Not so much, no. Perhaps I misrepresented myself. My job isn't to reproduce what one would have seen if they had been there. I cannot, however, produce something that they would NOT have seen if they had been there.
Doug MacMillan said:
your job is more
likely to create an image that will attract readers and boost
circulation
Click to expand...
I'm sure the "suits" would love it if that were the case but that's not where I want to be. Idealistic? Maybe. You've got to draw your own boundaries.
Doug MacMillan said:
Your reproduction
manager may merely be trying to keep folks from picking up the
paper and saying "what's wrong with them, can't they even get the
colors right?".
Click to expand...
I agree.
Doug MacMillan said:
I'm also very curious how long you've been a PJ and what your
paper's circulation is.
Click to expand...
What does the size of the Circ. matter? It's not large. A Non-metro division in the Nppa's contests.

How long have I been a PJ? Not long. About a year, actually. Funny you should mention journalism classes, though. I'm going to college part time in my off-hours. What I know about journalism comes from my experience with other professionals. I havn't taken any J.classes to date. That's why I've got to ask.

--
Al
Set low goals and you'll never be disapointed.
 
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