Using a Gray Card to Nail Your Color

SCOTT KELBY

If you’re going to be post-processing your images using a program like Photoshop, or Photoshop Elements, here’s a trick that will make the color correction process absolutely painless, and nearly automatic. Once you get your lighting in place, have your subject hold up a gray card target that has medium gray, light gray, black, and white on it (the one shown here is a target that comes free with my book, The Adobe Photoshop Book for Digital Photographers), then take a shot with it clearly in the frame. That’s it—you need just one shot with the subject holding the card. Now, when you open your photos in Photoshop (or Elements), open the Levels dialog, click on the gray Eyedropper that lives in the dialog, and click it on the medium gray color swatch. Then click the black Eyedropper on the black swatch, the white Eyedropper on the white swatch, and that’s it—you’ve color corrected that photo. Now you can open any other photo taken in that same lighting setup, and press Command-Option-L (PC: Ctrl-Alt-L) to apply that exact same color correction to this new photo. You can also use this same card for adjusting just the white balance of a RAW photo. Open that same photo in Photoshop’s Camera Raw (or Photoshop Lightroom’s Develop module) and get the White Balance tool from the Toolbox (or the Basic panel), then click it once on the light gray color swatch, and now your white balance is set. You can now apply that same white balance to all your RAW photos by copying-and-pasting just that white balance setting to as many photos as you want at once. A huge time saver.