White Balance: It's not always so balanced!

     Other than nailing your exposure "in camera" I think the first most important aspect in shooting is achieving the correct white balance. White balance is the color temperature read by the camera's sensor. For instance a church venue heavily light by incandescent light during a wedding will produce a 3200 K color temperature where as a sunny day outdoors can produce a white balance of 6500 k. When your camera's "white balance" settings is set on "auto" your camera guesses the best white balance for the given scene. And most times, it isn't correct!
     This is where custom white balance comes in! I personally like to use a gray card. This handy, inexpensive tool is one thing I hardly ever leave without when shooting in the studio! Since I do all my post processing in lightroom, I normally start the session off by taking an image of my gray card {this particular one is collapsible for easy storage} As you see below {please excuse the chipped nails! The nail color is "Sonic Boom" Sally Hanson Insta-Dri just in case you love it as much as I do!} I take an image of my hand so I can set my exposure to my style:



It is this image I use when I begin my editing in Lightroom. I can use my gray dropper to click on the gray card and it corrects the white balance for me. From there I can set my other images to the correct balance. This particular image was corrected to 6100K with a -7 on the green/purple slider. And presto! Here is a sample of the before and after. Notice how the correct white balance makes his skin look more creamy! What a difference!