Secret of White Balance for Infrared Photography — Manual & Histogram

How do you set a white balance in your infrared images when there are no color-neutral subjects? Let’s walk through setting a white balance manually and using the Histogram to help set a good white balance.

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Transcript for Secret of White Balance for Infrared Photography 4: Manual & Histogram. Duration: 8:18.

• 0:00 How do you white balance in color infrared photography when there are no good neutral subjects? Let's take a look at a tricky white balance situation how you can set a good white balance manually and how the Histogram can help with white balance. This image was shot with a 590 nanometer filter.
• 0:19 So as I look to set a white balance here, the first thing I'm going to do is change my profile. So we'll go from a standard profile from my camera to infrared temp negative 50. This will allow me to set color temperature values that are lower than normal. So if I use the white balance picker, I'll grab that.
• 0:38 I don't have my normal subjects. I do have some clouds here in the background and some other neutral areas. Let's examine some of those and see what they look like. We'll start with the clouds. If I click on the clouds, you'll see the clouds are very thin in the background, so they're very close to the sky color, which is
• 0:53 going to skew the sky towards white, which is going to make the foliage very colorful. So that's not exactly what I'm looking for. Let's hit the W key and try a patch on the ground here. We'll see what that looks like. This gives me a little bit better of a balance. I've got a little less strong color in the blue
• 1:13 foliage and a little bit more in the gold sky. Let's do one more sample on the post here and we'll see what this looks like. This is going to reduce the color in the foliage and increase the color in the sky. So I'm not really fully happy with any of these. can I do to find a good white balance?
• 1:30 The main thing that I want to accomplish with a white balance is a balance between the colors in the sky and the colors in the foliage. So let's go over to our temp slider and we will navigate dragging that back and forth. And what I'm going to do is slide back and forth. I'm looking at the image and what I'm doing is
• 1:46 I'm looking for a balance between the colors. So if I go too far to the left, that's going to overly favor the foliage. If I go too far to the right, that's going to overly favor the sky and I'm looking for a balance between the two. So somewhere in here is about what I'm looking at.
• 2:05 Now another way that you can do this is that you can look at the histogram up in this area. Notice that currently with when I have this white balance that I kind of like the value of the piles of pixels up here in the histogram as we've got the blue, green and red pixels. They're all kind of here centered in the middle of the image.
• 2:26 Now let's watch the histogram as I make adjustments to the temperature slider. If I go to the low end of the scale that is going to shift color towards the blue, you can see a bit askew. The blues are skewing high and the reds are skewing low off of the greens in the center of the histogram.
• 2:45 If I drag the temperature slider to the right to get an extreme over there, we're going to see the opposite. Now we've got reds in the highlights and blues in the shadows. So one of the things that I could do is look for a balance of colors in my histogram to try to set a good white balance.
• 3:03 So this time I'm going to set a white balance by looking at the histogram and not looking at the image. So let's drag our value down and I'm going to take a look at the histogram. I want to get gauge but I'm roughly looking for those reds and the greens to kind of land right on top of each other.
• 3:19 So if I do that, I'm going to end up here. That's pretty close to where I was previously. So we can, we can use a manual adjustment in the slider And we can look at the histogram to see that we have our colors roughly aligned. Now let's swap the colors and see if we can get a feel for the same process with our colors swapped.
• 3:37 So let's open up the profile browser over here and we will go down to the IR color swap negative 50 group. I want to match the temperature that I already have and I'm going to go down and pick the swap profile. So this will just give me a straight red blue swap of my colors. So we can close this and now we can go through the same exercise
• 3:57 but with the color swapped and it might be a little bit easier to see the impact. So if I white balance on the clouds, grab my white balance picker on the clouds, now you can see that there's a lot more color in the foliage and the sky is a bit muted. I hit my W key and go down into the dirt and select in here.
• 4:17 Now the white balance is favoring towards the foliage but that makes the sky extremely blue. And if I use the W key and select the post, that's even worse. So clearly I've got the same problems here but it's a little easier to see now that I've swapped my colors. Let's go through the same process.
• 4:35 I will look at the image and I'll try to eyeball the image again looking for a balance between the colors in the foliage and the colors in the sky. So I don't want either one to completely dominate the other. So I'm going to look somewhere in maybe this range and of course no surprise the values are pretty similar to what we had previously.
• 4:56 The values are no longer Kelvin because of our shift in color temperature but that doesn't matter I can still use the values to try to get a gauge of where I'm at. that's one view of it. Now if I do the same thing with the histogram, let's look at the histogram in this case when I go to the low side
• 5:11 going to see that reds become shifted to the highlights, the blues become shifted to the lower end and if I shift to the far right side of the scale it's the opposite. You can see that our three primary colors no longer line up. Now I can use the histogram to try to line these up and get them close together.
• 5:31 So this time I'm looking at the histogram and I'm trying to get these kind of piled together again. This is a imperfect sort of of science here but again I'm just looking to for to roughly gauge these three primary colors in the histogram and get them lined up. So when I do that I end up about
• 5:47 34-3500 so pretty close to where I was before. Let's do it one more time with a more extreme profile. We'll go into the profile browser and this time I'm going to select the purple profile. So this one's going to be a more extreme set of colors that you you might not use frequently in infrared but I
• 6:06 think could suit this image of these grapevines. Let's go through the same process. So we'll grab the white balance picker, we select the clouds, again the sky becomes muted, the foliage is a little too strong. Hit my W key and select the mud so now the sky is too strong foliage is muted and finally if I white
• 6:28 balance on the post then it's even more extreme. So let's go to our manual process of grabbing the slider and looking at the image trying to find a balance between those greens and purples. Whichever though there's no there's no exact white balance setting that is that is perfect in infrared
• 6:46 you're really looking for the best results for your image for me I find that that's frequently a clean balance separation between the sky color and the foliage color. So the values don't mean much except as a little bit of a gauge here so I can go back and forth till I get to this point where I feel
• 7:03 Somewhere in here is a good balance between the sky and the foliage. See I've got the same values here and I can do the same thing with the histogram. Let's look at the histogram. If I drag to the left on the temp slider now you can see it's the green that really stands out with this particular profile.
• 7:18 Each profile is going to be a little bit different in how it affects the colors and if I go to the right now that green has shifted the highlights of the image. So again I want to get those reds blues and greens all lined up and that will allow me to manually set a white balance for this image.
• 7:35 So now I'm looking at the histogram and I'm trying to get those three primary colors all roughly kind of on top of each other and so right in there that gets me a good value again pretty close to 3500. So that's going to be a good white balance for this particular image. If you'd like to learn more about infrared photography check out my new
• 7:56 course, Mastering infrared photography in Lightroom. It contains nearly four hours of lessons covering everything you need to edit infrared images. A similar course for Lightroom classic will be available in a few weeks. If you find these videos helpful on your infrared photography
• 8:13 journey like, subscribe or comment. Hope you enjoyed. Thanks.