Saturday afternoon, I photographed two of my cousins for
their senior pictures. And, as usual, the first picture I took generated a
puzzled look. One of the first pictures I take in all of my photo sessions is a
picture of my model holding a little piece of paper called a gray card. This
little card single handedly takes hours off of my editing time. My clients just
think I’m weird, but this card is one of my most important pieces of equipment.
The purpose of the gray card is to color correct images. By
including it in one picture in each setting that I photograph, I can simply go
into post processing and with about 3 clicks of my mouse fix the coloring of
all the photos taken in a session. I thought I would show a before and after of
one of my cousins, Leah. You can see that the before image on the left is very cool…it’s not a bad picture, but it doesn’t
reflect the warm light in which we actually photographed. With one simple step
in post processing, the gray card allowed me to color correct the image, saving
me a lot of time and frustration. So easy to use, and it creates a much more
accurate picture!
