Color balancing

One of my biggest bugbears with digital is color balancing, I always seem to struggle with it. With film I usually used an 81A or B warming filter and I could always just shrug and say it is "fine art" if something looked slightly whacky.

Does anyone have experience of or recommendations for PS plugins such as http://www.vividdetails.com/introduction.html ?

The vivid details test strip is a nice rudimentary plug-in that makes small color changes easy but it isn't very sophisticated.

If you are shooting with a digital camera, then I would recommend shooting in RAW mode which then allows you to adjust the white balance prior to converting the image to a standard image file to your taste. Many of the RAW conversion tools actually allow you to specify Kelvin temperatures and some also allow you to click on a neutral tone white, gray or black and the images white balance is then corrected for neutral.

If you are referring to scanned film when you say "digital" you can make corrections prior to scanning but its typically easier to do them after scanning. The color balance and hue/saturation tools can be used independent or together as can the levels and curves tools to make precise color balance adjustments. There are a number of very powerful filter programs too like NIK Color Effects and Photo Optics, both I highly recommend for post exposure filtering. But really learning Photoshop or your photo editor is the key as most things that can be done with plug-ins can also be done with the basic tools provided by the programs. All of the above apply to digital capture as well for post conversion processing.

Thanks for the reply EJ, I'm shooting a D100 and do save in RAW but for some reason I often struggle to settle on a good color - especially when processing images captured in shadow / overcast conditions. I've been using Capture One DSLR LE but I might try the Nikon software again - the trouble is I'd have to pay for it as I used up my free tryout a while back !

Andrew I'm not sure how you could be having problems with color balance for the D100 if you weren't having it for film.

The simplest way to handle color balance is to set the D100 to Sunny and treat it like you would for film. Do you put difference film into your camera to handle shadow or overcast conditions? If not, you would filter just like you do for film and the D100 will respond the same way.

The benefit of the D100 is it allows you to change the film type from frame to frame. Using RAW, it even lets you make some adjustments after the fact. But if you additionally filtered the lens, you may simply want to set the color to 5200K, 5400K or 5600K and leave it alone.

If you want to ask specific questions or if you want help working through an example, you can email me the RAW file and I'll help you through it.

Tony is a Nikon digital expert so his suggestions are from a much more hands on perspective than mine are (I shoot Canon digital) so I will leave you in his capable hands

Thanks for the feedback - I'm back on the road as a Semiconductor Technology Nomad (EJ - think Applied process support, customer snaps fingers, Applied engineer heads for airport !) for a few weeks but when I'm home I'll send Tony a file. I think the problem may just be that I spent 3 years shooting in NM using Velvia and Provia 100F with 81A/B filters. Now I'm in lowland Texas. Still, 95% of my D100 shots are great straight out of the can (I suppose that should now read "straight off the chip" ) but it seems that when I'm shooting in dull conditions with a scene with lots of pale green I start to flounder.