The Photography Tip of the Week #077

Posted by Philip in Photo Processing, Podcast

Same Time Color Correct

077 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)

When post processing your photos one of the most common tasks is color correction.  If you are using a pro photo product that does the color correction for you, then this tip does not apply to you.  However, if you are manually correcting the color of a photo, then you need to pick a time of the day that you perform your color corrections.  The goal is to improve your consistency, so it’s important to have not only the same environmental conditions, but for you to be physically in a similar state as well. I like to do my portrait color corrections about a half hour after I get up in the morning for these reasons:

1. I’m well rested, especially my eyes are well rested.
2. My office is on the west side of the house so I don’t have the morning sun streaming in through the windows.
3. I don’t have a lot on my mind yet, so it’s a more relaxing time of the day.

I wanted to put this to the test  so I performed color correction to the same image at different times of the day over the period of a couple of days just to see what the difference would look like.  The point of this exercise was not to make a value judgement as to which is the better image, but to see what the difference is between the images from different times of the day.  I had to do them several days apart so I wouldn’t accidentally remember what settings I used previously.

Testing manual color correction at different times of the day.

As you can see there’s a big difference.  Even though I did attempt to make the environmental conditions the same. I wanted the same amount of ambient light and made sure I calibrated the monitor before performing each color correction. There’s a pretty sizable difference.  In my case the morning version prints much better on my printers than the afternoon version.

I know you don’t always have the option of picking when you post process all of your images.  But if you can create a habit or build it into your schedule to do this work at the same time of the day under similar conditions, you will achieve more consistent output.