White balance and Color correction

[Khalaful]

I have questions about white balance and color correction in detail:

White balance

I keep struggling with white balance if Calibrite's Colorchecker. Mine is only 2 years old and yet it does not give accurate white balance in many situations. Direct sunlight, shaded area, cloudy day, and more. How do you get a perfect white balance whenever you shoot outside? Am I suppose to get Delta 1 Gray card instead? And how do you deal with mixed lighting situation? How professionals adjust white balance to perfection?

Color calibration and correction

Might be the hardest before you start editing and grading your pic. There are quite a lot of people retouching images as close to original color as possible or somewhat commercial color tone instead of film or fancy color tone. I will not talk about film tone or unique color tone but how people calibrate or correct the color? Do they just use color checker and then make a specific profile or do they have to adjust colors manually and one by one? I think Karl Taylor's images are great example of commercial color tones.

 

[Zeee]

not to forget that every human does eventually see color in a different way. my "correct" could be very different to the "correct" of someone else.

https://www.xrite.com/de/hue-test

That has happened to X-Rite,Lumariver, C1Pro, DXO, ON1, Sony, Canon, Nikon and all the other developers and camera companies.

I read colours are more vivid for children. Makes sense. As for us seeing colour differently is based on the conditions of our rods and cones in our eyes. Being in print media we administered colour hue tests for anyone applying to work on a press.



When I was 16 and drove the music was so loud my ears would bleed. Now I have to turn the volume down so I can see where I’m going.

 

[Ken Seals]

Make sure the lighting in your workspace is not too bright.
It really helps to also have white border around your image to reference pure white against. I recommend this over a black or grey border.

This (and your entire post) is excellent advice. So many of my photo friends are using iMacs with the brightness set too high, resulting in their finished images being too dark. For the ones who don't calibrate or set the brightness properly, I recommend that they use the White background in Lightroom Classic/ACR in order to have a white reference. One recurring thing I see in surfing photos where the foam on the waves comes out some shade of middle gray. Yuck!

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[Ken Seals]

How do you get a perfect white balance whenever you shoot outside? Am I suppose to get Delta 1 Gray card instead? And how do you deal with mixed lighting situation? How professionals adjust white balance to perfection?

... how people calibrate or correct the color? Do they just use color checker and then make a specific profile or do they have to adjust colors manually and one by one?

I'm surprised that so many replies here are just make the colors the way you want them.

Maybe that's what is generally done in the Retouching subforum, but it's not the only answer. You might want to post these questions in the Pro Digital and Photographic Science and Technology subforums and see if the replies are different.

Perhaps, if the OP is trying to get "John Deere green" or "Coca Cola Red" perfect, otherwise just adjust colors to taste.