Doug Kerr
Well-known member
In the latest print issue of Popular Photography, an article by postprocessing wizard Debbie Grossman, "Face Facts", gives hints on editing portraits in Lightroom. Step 1 is crop to suit. Step 2 is "Adjust your white balance". It suggests using the whites of the model's eyes as a neutral target. It suggests moving the eyedropper tool over that area, watching the report of the color as R,G,B, until a spot is found where the three values are nearly equal, and then clicking on that spot.
Now I may be handicapped by not ever having used Lightroom, but I am baffled by this. It would seem to me that when we click the eyedropper on a certain spot in the image, we are telling the program, "Shift the chromaticities in the image so this spot has the chromaticity of the color space white point".
But, if we have followed the directions, we have (if possible) clicked on a spot that already has almost the chromaticity of the white point (R=G=B). So nothing would be changed - that is, we have in fact ascertained that the white balance is already correct.
Now, if it is the white balance is not already correct, then presumably (since we assume that the whites of the model's eyes are everywhere very close to neutral) we would not find a place where the eyedropper reads approximately equal R, G, and B values. Then what?
So what am I missing here? Or has this "procedure" just been scrambled in the retelling?
Best regards,
Doug
Now I may be handicapped by not ever having used Lightroom, but I am baffled by this. It would seem to me that when we click the eyedropper on a certain spot in the image, we are telling the program, "Shift the chromaticities in the image so this spot has the chromaticity of the color space white point".
But, if we have followed the directions, we have (if possible) clicked on a spot that already has almost the chromaticity of the white point (R=G=B). So nothing would be changed - that is, we have in fact ascertained that the white balance is already correct.
Now, if it is the white balance is not already correct, then presumably (since we assume that the whites of the model's eyes are everywhere very close to neutral) we would not find a place where the eyedropper reads approximately equal R, G, and B values. Then what?
So what am I missing here? Or has this "procedure" just been scrambled in the retelling?
Best regards,
Doug