Colors of pavement, white balance...

[Wes Duenkel]

This has been bugging me for a while. I've noticed the pavement at many tracks carries a "color cast" that's distracting...or at least my camera/workflow picks it up. My biggest challenges are (my local track) Nashville Superspeedway, and Barber Motorsports Park. I have an extremely difficult time trying to minimize it in my post-processing. It seems to throw the whole white balance off, resulting in a pukey image. Paying attention to the pavement hues, here are two examples:

"Pepto-pavement"
http://www.wesduenkel.com/Download/20070519_0107.jpg

"Purple People Eater Pavement"
http://www.wesduenkel.com/Download/060728_0523.jpg

Yack. Anyway, two questions:

1) Does anyone else have this issue?

2) If so, how do you successfully correct for it?

[Todd Corzett]

It seems to throw the whole white balance off, resulting in a pukey image.
1) Does anyone else have this issue?
2) If so, how do you successfully correct for it?

Well, I believe you are correct with the white balance thing. To me, the car is the culprit in these images... and the pavement/background is just an innocent bystander in the whole thing. I saw this same thing quite often when shooting at Laguna Seca with the whole background being the same dirt color. Yellow/blue cars would create really off colors when using auto white balance (AWB).

How did I solve it? I bought a 1D MkII and haven't needed to worry about it because the AWB is so much better than my D30 was. Now that's not really a solution, but it highlights the problem... AWB. If you are having problems with white balance in auto modes then switch to manual white balance. Just like everything else... auto exposure, auto shutter/aperture, etc. doesn't always work for all situations. Personally, I only had a few shots a weekend that were problems... and I'd much rather just tweak those than have to worry about taking/setting white balances every time the light changes.

Getting to 9/10th is a heck of a lot easier than that last 1/10th... when you are searching for perfection, it is rare that there is an easy, batch, or 'catch all' method to do things.

-Todd...

PS - the color of the light also plays into things... the second shot is overcast (different color of light) resulting in different colors (regardless of what your WB is set to).

[Wes Duenkel]

Good points, Todd. Both were shot in AWB, the top with my 1DMKII and the bottom with my 20D. I shoot with both, and the issue seems to be the same with both. I noticed today that I see the same colors of pavement with my polarized sunglasses. I shoot with a polarizer, so perhaps that is bringing the colors of the pavement out. How many others shoot with polarizers?

[David Lister]

I only use a polarizer occasionally..

[John Waugh]

You might pull your polarizer and shoot in RAW.
It will cost you more cards, but the additional controls in most
RAW processors ( Aperture, Lightroom, Canon DPP,) will solve your problems.

[Wes Duenkel]

Good point, John. These were shot as JPG, and most events I now shoot raw. The above was a club event, and I frankly didn't have time to process RAW.

I like using the polarizer to cut through windshield glare. Maybe I need to try without it for my next event...

[John Waugh]

Several of the new photography management softwares, Aperture and Lightroom in particular have RAW processors that are faster than using CS2 or CS3 (with out RAW conversion) See the PC vs.MAC threads as I don't want to open that can of worms here. With either of those softwares, depending on your platform, you can shoot in RAW and keep your images in RAW until you you export them for delivery. You might find it's easier than you think. I find that Aperture has cut my post processing time from an event considerably.

[Jacob Leveton]

what about setting the w/b to cloudy or sunny, depending on the day, and just worrying about having consistent color in all the shots?

[Wes Duenkel]

John, I use Capture1 and the processing takes quite a bit of time...which I don't have when I need to get the images to the 1-hour photo lab the next morning ;)

Jacob, that would be a good approach, however the weather conditions are rarely consistent throughout the day, so I'd probably be chasing my tail.

I guess RAW would be the answer...not the easiest, but probably the best. I need a faster 'puter!