White balance/color standards? Photographing accurate bloom color

[MateoinLosAngeles]

Can anyone recommend settings to accurately reflect color? I wonder if any standard has been set, in my view, the most honest would probably be setting the wb to 5000K and use matching artificial light. But otherwise I feel it’s easy to misrepresent color, especially for those flowers that are sort of “in between” (you know those oranges that borderline yellow, or those pinks that are almost purple)

Photography pros let me know your tips and tricks!

[Ray]

I suspect that each AOS award photographer has his or her own preferred setup, but if you're using a digital camera, the primary obstacle to overcome is the spectral sensitivity of the sensor, as they vary.

[WaterWitchin]

I take terrible photos now. Just a cell phone snap and go. Hopefully Roberta will chime in... she takes great pictures.

[Roberta]

Thanks, WW.
White balance is really tough to get right. Reds are especially hard. There are some flowers that I just give up and photograph outside in daylight even if I can't control the background as well. I never did get it right with incandescent flood lights indoors. Fairly recently I replaced them with LED floods, daylight that give a 5000K rating, set my little camera (Panasonic Lumix DDC-ZS70) to that setting for WB, and have been getting much better results. My camera is a lot better than a phone but still is point-and-shoot so certainly not up to "photographer" standards. I have spend some time in the company of Ron Parsons, who has his photographs in Orchids and Orchid Digest all the time, taking most of his photographs in the field or in people's growing areas (not "studio" setup), he uses a ring flash to fantastic effect. So with a DSLR and control of one's lighting it can be done (but I have also seen plenty of AOS photos where the white balance WASN'T so great) but not easy. All else fails, a good photo editor can help "fix" things... Photoshop of course, but the free (for personal use) Irfanview has really nice, easy to use color-adjustment functionality.

Even daylight can be tricky... early in the day, especially with cloud cover, photos taken with AWB setting on the camera can be too blue. Mostly, though, that works pretty well with daylight, and the "sun" setting with the 5000 K floods indoors is close. Texture is another confounding factor... the velvety dark lips of some Catts and Cyms just never look quite right. Or those where the color is from tiny purple hairs over orange, like Masd. veitchii. Sometimes you just have to be there...

[estación seca]

I know a wedding photographer, a dog photographer and multiple highly-published cactus and succulent photographers. They all say they spend a lot of time on the computer adjusting color for every image.

[MateoinLosAngeles]

Thank you guys! I might've presented myself as a bit too much of a noob, but I actually am a professional photographer and designer. For years I've supplemented my income as a freelance doing website design, video editing, graphic design, and creative direction. As a photographer, my photos have been published in outlets like Time Out, and I mainly do portraits but also some artsy stuff and live events.

So I may be able to offer some extra info here:

- Yes, photos are heavily edited. There are two programs we use in the industry: Photoshop and Lightroom. And most photographers I know use Lightroom for pretty much everything from editing exposure to adjusting color. Photoshop, although capable of making some of those adjustments, is much better suited for actual retouching, like changing someone's nose or evening skin tones.

- If your camera is able to capture RAW files, then your camera settings don't matter. You can adjust everything in Lightroom using the RAW file.

- We use two different color models: RGB and CMYK. RGB is an additive color model based on light. What this means is that "black" is the absence of light, whereas "white" would be the addition of Red, Green, and Blue. This is the mode used on screens as they emit light to produce color. CMYK is subtractive and can't have whites. Whites in CMYK are the absence of pigment (sound familiar? Alba varieties, anyone?) whereas blacks are the addition of all the pigments at equal levels, so 100% Cyan, 100% Magenta, 100% Yellow result in black (CMY model), professional printing creates a separate black pigment (K) because currently available cyan, magenta, and yellow pigments don't result in pure black.

- When I photograph a subject, I write down their skin color and undertone so I can remember because I can't figure it out from the photo alone. I also request selfies, family pictures, etc. As a basic rule: black absorbs light, and white reflects it. Very fair skin tones can easily be overexposed. Dark skin tones will absorb light and lack detail if illuminated incorrectly. With complex eye colors like blue eyes, I need to look at selfies and photos of the subject and make a decision on how "they look on average" Each photo will have a slightly different tone of blue depending on a series of factors, and it can take weeks from the time I meet the person to the time I edit the photos so I will forget how they look in real life. It takes very little to turn a deep blue eye into a bright green one. So you look at all their photos and try to reach "a happy middle."

Now for orchids. I've really just started photographing flowers, and it is yet another challenge, especially because I don't want to spend a ton of time editing them. But these are my main observations:

- The biggest problem I see in photos of flowers is that they're out of focus. People trying to get the flower, the plant, and the stem in focus usually only get one or two out of the three. This issue is partly due to using a shallow depth of field (a low f-number). In order to get a "blurry" background, you need to lower the f-number, but this also makes it more difficult to focus. One may use a macro lens, but it would be hard to get an entire plant in focus. What I would recommend is getting a tele lens (anything above 85 mm, I like 200 mm) and placing the plant very far away from the background. This gets you a blurry background (no creases!) and the entire plant in focus. Attempting to get a detail of the flower might make it impossible to get the rest of the plant in focus. What I look for in these cases is that all the parts of the flower are in focus, as that's my priority. With the right lens, this is possible.

- Yes, with DSLRs, MFT, and mirrorless digital cameras, the sensor is very important, but also the software used by the developers to interpret color and fix any shortcomings of the sensor. For some cameras, you can select the color space, which tells the camera how you want it to interpret the color information captured by the sensor.

Now, some kinks that need to be worked out:

- A flower would technically be closer to CMYK as it is subtracting color. There are no truly black flowers, just extremely dark burgundy ones. When a flower doesn't have pigment, it's an alba variety, it makes sense. So it's a challenge to reproduce the color adequately on an RGB system (screens or even your camera). Don't ask me how to figure this one out, I find it really challenging since you want to capture something that accurately represents the colors.

- What I would do if I wanted to be super accurate: I would get myself a printed color sample in the color space I want to use (e.g. pantone) and visually pick the Pantone colors that come closer to the flower. So for example, for Cattleya rex I would want to define the lightest and the darkest purples and the darkest yellow. Darkest is the most saturated part. Then I would let all the colors fall somewhere in between these extremes.

- I also think it can be helpful to use the green tone of the leaves as a guide.

- It makes sense that different photographers have developed their own presets as they know what works, and this is their area of expertise. It is, however, quite the leap to go from skins to flower colors. It is true that our own perception of the colors of the flower will vary based on the light.

- Roberta, your experiment aligns with my suspicion that 5000 K is the right setting as this is the closest to "pure white" light. Ring lights are usually around 5000 K, and they also diffuse the light in a way that will add dimension to the flower, whereas a "flat" light might "flatten" the plant, so I think a ring light is a great option

- For the velvety detail, try to get a macro lens.

- If any of you wants to get a nice photo of a very dark plant, either dark foliage or "black" flowers like Fdk. After Dark 'Black Pearl' or Monn. Millennium Magic 'Witchcraft', you need to diffuse the light very evenly. For dark skin subjects, I use silk fabric which you can either place on top of the light or direct the light to the fabric and let it indirectly illuminate the subject, or in this case, the plant. The structure of silk will scatter the light very evenly allowing you to capture detail.

And yes, after sharing all of that, I swear I still haven't figured it out, so if you continue to have any tips and tricks, please keep sharing them.

[Roberta]

Another technique that yields wonderful results in macro photography of small flowers especially, is stacking. Again something for which I have neither the equipment or the patience. But some of the smallest flowers are extremely intricate, and if you use a macro lens to to get really close up, it can be physically impossible to get the whole thing in focus. (Nobody has repealed the laws of physics that control depth of field...) But stacking software can take multiple photos, at different points of focus, and knit them together. Something you might want to play with if you haven't already...

A trick I learned from a society member (and professional photographer) for getting that diffused light was to crinkle up a sheet of aluminum foil and then smooth it out, glue to a a sheet of poster board. The "crinkles" let the metallic surface reflect light that is softly diffused.

Along with giving a nicely controlled light, ring flash has another advantage - the flower gets strong light, but the light is mostly in the plane of the subject, so that background is much under-exposed. Especially when photographing under "field" conditions, this hides much of the background clutter without the need to actually cover it.

[Dalachin]

Tons of great advice above.

If I was interested in being as color accurate as possible, I would use either a gray card ($2.95 from BH Photovideo) or a calibrated color card. I would shoot in RAW and as part of my shoot, I would also capture photos of the card in the same lighting conditions as the subject. When editing in a RAW editor such as Adobe camera raw or Lightroom or similar, I would use the photos of the card to calibrate my shoot.

[DirtyCoconuts]

here is a really easy trick to HELP, does not actually fix anything.

i keep a white index card in my pocket and will either hold it in front of the picture subject to allow the camera to balance or, more often, i just have a white to use for balance in edit.

truth be told. i rarely edit at all and i usually shoot at night with a flash. taking one shot of the white card and then one of the plant seems to yield decent results for me

[Dalachin]

Originally Posted by DirtyCoconuts

here is a really easy trick to HELP, does not actually fix anything.

i keep a white index card in my pocket and will either hold it in front of the picture subject to allow the camera to balance or, more often, i just have a white to use for balance in edit.

truth be told. i rarely edit at all and i usually shoot at night with a flash. taking one shot of the white card and then one of the plant seems to yield decent results for me

I like that method, smart and efficient. The only thing it doesn't allow is variation in the lighting... although it could if you had flash modifiers and a cord or wireless flash connector to allow off-camera flash. Flash is also balanced to be as "white" as possible which helps prevent color casts.

It is totally true that if I don't have a calibrated gray or color card, I just grab a white sheet of printer paper and hope that the white is white. Theoretically setting a custom white balance in the camera will yield the same result as doing it in editing.

Best,
Christine