Catching the fast vanishing fall colors is always rewarding and the Lake County Metroparks are a great place to take nature photographs during a warm October day. Using a tripod to steady the camera and prevent any shake, and setting a low ISO to avoid digital noise, I captured the following scene of Chair Factory Falls.
| Blue Falls |
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| Click to Enlarge |
Looks pretty good or so I thought until someone asked me how I made the water so blue. Puzzling since this was one of those rare images that I pretty much took directly from the camera and didn’t manipulate.
I remarked that the sky was especially blue that day and this was reflected in the water but later realized that the camera let me down.
The human brain automatically adjusts colors so that neutrals such as white, black and grey, stay neutral despite the light. If someone wears a white T-shirt outdoors on a warm sunny day, it doesn’t look yellow and then turn blue when they walk inside under a cool fluorescent light. So, why should a waterfalls?
The camera used an auto white balance and made the whole scene too cool. Changing the white balance to warm is one way to remove the cast but there’s not a good way to tell when the water is truly white or if you overshoot and make orange-red water.
| Eyedropper Points |
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| White Water |
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Click the eyedropper on a few points of light and dark areas of water and it’s easy to see how much extra blue is present. The bright points, those near 255, look balanced but the midtones are too blue. True neutral means the red channel = the green channel = the blue channel,.
A couple of curves later to balance all the numbers and the photograph warms with pure white water. Definitely more in line with what I remembered that fall day.
[Excerpted from Photography Insights, Volume 2, by Scott Ober, MD, Copyright © 2011 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED]
