Today on the Sensor Plane I want to talk a little about an oft-overlooked creative tool: white balance. You can use the camera white balance setting to change the mood and feel of your images both directly in camera or in post. While it’s important to get proper white balance in your shots, remember that if you shoot in RAW it’s very easy to adjust after the fact.
The Sensor Plane Photography Podcast with Jason Odell
Color infrared image captured with a Nikon D700 and processed in Lightroom 5 and Adobe Photoshop CS6.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom does not handle RAW images captured with an infrared (IR) converted camera well by default. The problem lies in the white balance settings, which can be a real challenge to get right. However, you can work around this problem by creating a custom camera calibration profile using Adobe’s DNG Profile Editor software. The custom profile will let you have the necessary latitude to correct the WB setting in your IR images for further processing.
Here’s the whole process explained in a brief video that I put together:
