Understanding Color Meters & Lighting Color Management

All lighting has color, from a warm sunset to the inside of an industrial factory, and each is unique to its color. Fortunately today, digital cameras have an amazing ability to capture images in these different lighting conditions and ‘neutralize’ these colors to look ‘normal.’ But if you are a professional photographer shooting architecture, industrial, or commercial photography your client will rely on you to capture scenes with correct color. Auto White Balance or WB Presets on digital cameras only fix part of the problem and cant solve a mixed light situation. This course will quickly show you how to look at color, how to photograph in mixed lighting conditions, how to use a color meter, and how to balance scenes with varying colored light sources.

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Do you ever wonder why, when photographing indoors, your images have a green, amber, or blue color shift? This is often the result of photographing in different light sources other than daylight. Fluorescent light is often green in color, living room lamps have an amber tint, and then there are sodium vapors and mercury vapors and other light sources of different color temperatures.

Now introduce your strobe lights, which are daylight balanced, into the mix of other light sources and you have a problem known as ‘mixed lighting.’  To work with strobes in different color light sources you need to have the tools to match light sources to create photographs that are color balanced.
Using a custom white balance or auto white balance might get you close, but these methods cant make different lights sources the same color, only provide a compromise. Camera Raw will also get you close, but again it is a compromise and professional photographers don’t compromise. If you are shooting an assignment of a hotel interior for the architect they will expect perfect color balance, not a compromise.
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If you find your self in this position, then this short photo clinic is for you!  Join award-winning commercial photographer Charlie Borland as he shares his knowledge in a step-by-step approach to help you jump start into a color manager and lighting expert. Charlie has developed an excellent online photo clinic that deals specifically with color balance and strobe lighting.

This course is geared to intermediate  through professional photographers. (If you consider yourself a beginner, what is important is you know how to use strobe lights.) You will learn how to deal with locations that have numerous light sources of different color, how to change the color of your strobes, how to use a color meter, and finally how to fix some color in Photoshop.
What’s covered:
·  Color Theory
·  Correcting for color balance
·  Using strobes and changing their color
·  How a color meter works.
·  Controlling color with exposure
·  Using color shift creatively

This course includes written and video lectures for easy understanding. 

Instructor: Charlie Borland has been a commercial and stock photographer for over 30 years. He has photographed for a wide range of clients including: Xerox, NW Airlines, Fujitsu, Tektronix, Nike, Blue Cross, Nationsbank, Precision Castpart’s Corp., Mentor Graphics, Texas Instruments, Pacificorp, Cellular One, Sequent Computer, Early Winters, Cascade Bancorp, and AGC. His imagery has been used thousands of times worldwide and a sampling include: National Geographic Adventure and Traveler, Outside, Women’s Sport and Fitness, Newsweek, TV Guide, CIO, Sports Illustrated for Women, Time, Backpacker, Sunset, American Photo, Outdoor Photographer, Eco Traveler, Southern Bell, to name a few. Charlie is the co-author to Understanding Flash and the author of Outdoor Flash Photography.  Charlie has been teaching for over a decade and teaches several courses here.