White Balancing Shots and Solving Common Problems

Hi Patrick, I have a question about correcting and node order when the DP shot a scene with a specific white balance to build the look in camera. If you were grading, would you do your first pass, where you correct the shot first to “proper” white balance, then after balancing all your shots, go with a second node and grade the color back in? Thanks. Been really enjoying these insights!

Hi Grant. I’m actually going to address this in the next Insight I’ll be releasing in Part 3 of this series.

Ideally, if your DP is building the look in camera and is using Gels for that purpose, they should expose a graycard with the Key Light, un-gelled. This way you can set your white balance to the color temp of the underlying primary illuminant of the scene. Then, when they gel the lights you’ll perfectly pick up the intended tonality from on-set.

There have been a few jobs where I’ve graded out the onset look and then recreated it – but usually only when there’s major inconsistency between setups.

Patrick, thank you for this insights series.
I really would like to see Part 3 of this insights, where you is going to describe the approach about correcting a scene when the DoP builds an specific look using Gels in front of the camera to achieve a certain look.

Thanks for the reminder. I’ve put this back on my roadmap.

sounds good 🙂

I’m rewatching this and there’s some great little bits of grading info that I often overlook! Any updates on Part 3?

Yikes. I dropped the ball a 2nd time on this. It’s coming soon!

Hi Patrick,

After a year, I too am rewatching this series of insights. Is there an update to part 1 & 2 of this serie describing the approach mentioned in my first reply in reference to color balancing a scene or shot while respecting the DoP created look on-set when using filters, gels, etc; this to come up with a specific look? Similar to Blade Runner 2049, where Roger Deakins used heavy orange filters in front of the camera in some of the exterior and interior scenes of the film.

Normally, on-set color balance is applied on camera before the filters are used, but it would be interesting to know how to deal with this in post, especially when the DoP is not around.

I’m asking this again because “color balance” as an operation to correct a shot in the way explained in the two previous insigts can become an obstacle to the intended look of the DoP/director.

Hi Patrick. From time to time I stumble upon shots where the white balance is completely missed during shooting. For example a completely golden/yellow flooded room during sunset, where the white balance in camera was set to 6500K and recorded in a non raw format, so the white balance is baked in the file. The result was a orange flooded image (in my case from an Arri Alexa/LOG-C/ProRes4444) .When correcting that image to be neutral I noticed, that even the suroundings seems to look ok neutral, the skin tones still were a muddy orange/brown mess.

My question to this:
1. Technically: Why is the image not or hardly balanceable? How does the sensor and in camera mathemetics behave to such missed whitebalance and skin tones? Is there data lost when whitebalace is off so much?
2. How do you tackle such shots?