San Diego Children's and Newborn Baby Photographer | Little Sprout Photography

Want to instantly improve the quality of your portraits? Whether you’re using a point-and-shoot or an expensive digital SLR, set your camera’s white balance to Cloudy. And leave it there. If you’re shooting people, the cloudy setting does a really nice job of warming them up just a bit…and people usually look better slightly warm than cool. Your mileage may vary, but I find that 9 times out of 10, you’ll see better results.

To illustrate this point, here’s an image using the camera’s auto white balance. This photo was in the shade, about an hour before sunset. The camera decided that the optimal white balance should be 4750 degrees Kelvin, which is a little on the cool side for my taste.

NikonD700/24-70mm 2.8 @ 70mm | 1/200s | f4 | ISO400

Here’s the same image using the Cloudy white balance setting of 6500K. Skin tones seem more natural and the background picks up some of the golden tones of the setting sun.

NikonD700/24-70mm 2.8 @ 70mm | 1/200s | f4 | ISO400

What about RAW files?

If you’re shooting RAW files, I still recommend leaving your white balance set to Cloudy. Your photos will look much better coming into Lightroom and it will save you the time of adjusting your images. Of course, since it’s RAW, you can always tweak the color temperature later.

If you’re manually adjusting the temperature in Lightroom, a good rule of thumb is to start around 5000K and slowly increase the temp. until it looks good. Somewhere between 5000-6000K seems to be the sweet spot for portrait photographs in natural light.

We’ve recently been experimenting with balancing ambient light and flash. Thanks to the wealth of information on Strobist and some of the examples in Joe McNally‘s books, we’re finding it pretty straightforward to add a little pop to an image or use light for creative effect. We wanted to share a couple sample images and explain the process we went through to arrive at the final result.

In this first photo, the sun was behind and to the left of the kids. It was pretty early in the morning, so the sun was pretty low in the sky and giving the left sides of their heads a nice golden highlight. Unfortunately, their eyes and the shadows on their faces were a bit too dark. Because the basic exposure was pretty good, I kept it as metered and added just a flick of flash (dialed down a stop or so) to fill in some of the shadows and provide a a slight catch light to their eyes. The flash was also aimed above their heads to feather the light a little bit. The result is an image that looks naturally lit; the flash is nearly invisible.

NikonD700/24-70mm 2.8 @ 50mm | 1/500s | f5.6 | ISO500

In this next image, we were feeling a bit more adventurous and wanted to try some of the examples from The Hot Shoe Diaries. Though the sky looks like dusk, the image was actually taken around 2:30pm. First, we set the camera’s white balance to tungsten, which shifted everything to blue, and also underexposed the image by -1 stop to get the sky even darker. The main light is an off-camera speedlight (triggered via Nikon CLS) shooting through a white umbrella just out of frame on the right side. To compensate for the darker image, we added +2 stop to the flash output setting.

At this point, the entire image is still blue since the flash is daylight-balanced. To get Ainsley back to the right color, we added a CTO gel (orange color) to the front of the flash. She comes out properly lit, but everything else stays blue.

NikonD700/24-70mm 2.8 @ 38mm | 1/250s | f10 | ISO200

While it’s still a bit cool out, the flowers seem to think it is spring.  It’s a great time to get out and take advantage of the wild flowers and overgrown weeds.  It doesn’t last for long here in Southern California.