18% Gray Card

[Peter De Smidt]

I recently purchased the smaller White Balance Reference Card. I had been hoping to use it to color correct my digital camera images according to the technique expoused at: http://www.adobeevangelists.com/pdfs/photoshop/tipsandtricks/CorrectByNumbers.pdf . Basically, this technique has you color correct your image using a white area, a black area, and a middle gray area. When I used the WhiBal to do this, though, it didn't work. As a result, I got out my MacBeth color checker and used the white, 18% gray, and black patches with the same technique. It worked very well. My conclusion is that the two light gray tiles of the WhiBal are too light to use for this technique, which is a shame. Hence, I'd like to request a true 18% tile be made available for people like me (who doesn't currently have a digital camera with RAW.) Such a tile would also be very useful for traditional zone system photographers, who could then use the gray tile and their spot meters to get a reading equivalent to an incident meter. It would also be useful (as are the other tiles) for running standard zone system tests for BW films. This aspect of the WhiBal could be advertised for this purpose in magazines that cater to zone system photographers, such as View Camera...

[MichaelT]

The problem is one of scale of manufacturing. In order to order a custom 18% purely neutral plastic, I would need to order a truckload (seriously, about 10 tons). So the reality is that there are not enough WhiBals to be sold by me to make that investment. It could and is done with other technicuqes like the Gretag, but then you have the issues of fading, scratching, getting it wet, and other issues that make it not a long lasting product, one of the big attributes of the WhiBal. So good thought but I was forced to go with the available grays which work out very well in setting the WB of both RAW (light Gray) and JPEG (dark gray images). The technicuqe in the paper was useful for when a WhiBal was not shot. You should be able to use the dark gray alone with the middle levels dropper to get a good white balance. Also we are working with a 3rd party to create a WhiBal plug-in for PS that will do what you are trying to do, but matched to the WhiBal dna much faster and more accurate. More on that later. Thanks for the feedback..

[ph0t0man]

Is it your plan to provide owners of Whitbal this plugin for free, or will it be an additional item to purchase? Just curious, and waiting for my cards to arrive :)

[MichaelT]

The Plug-in is not written by us, and it will be available for sale. More soon..