By Ryan Klos, Calumet Photographic

If you’re shooting digital, you’ve undoubtedly seen your images come out too cool, too warm or somehow just not right when it comes to color. You’ve also undoubtedly spent a good amount of time correcting them during post-processing. But as any good photographer knows, you shouldn’t fix in post what you can capture properly during the shoot. The quickest, most effective way to get accurate color during a shoot is by defining the custom white balance setting in your camera. Typically you do this is by taking a picture of something entirely white—such as a sheet of white paper or a white target—under the same lighting conditions as the rest of the photos you’re going to shoot. Then you’d define this as white for your camera—basically you’re telling your camera what white looks like under your current lighting conditions.

While this process works and will yield fairly accurate results, ExpoImaging has made this process of setting a custom white balance much easier, and accurate, with the ExpoDisc. The ExpoDisc makes custom balancing extremely simple—much simpler than trying fill your frame with a sheet of white paper or calibration target. And, since the ExpoDisc goes over your lens, you won’t have to worry about shooting at the proper angle to avoid reflection or shadows that may inhibit accurate capture.

The Processes
ExpoDisc is extremely easy to use and the instructions are very clear. In a nutshell, place the ExpoDisc on the end of your lens (you can leave your protective UV filter on), turn off auto-focus, stand where your subject will be positioned, aim at your light source and shoot. The image you captured will be one solid color, something close to white. In your camera’s settings choose the custom white balance setting, and when it asks you to choose an image for the target, choose the image you just shot. Make sure your white balance mode is set to custom and you’re ready for the rest of your shoot. It works both in studio settings with strobes and in ambient light settings—even outdoors.

The Test
For the first test I shot a small garden gnome out in near-direct sunlight. There was a bit of cloud-cover but still fairly sunny out.

For my second test I wanted to see how the ExpoDiscs performed in-studio. Here are the results.

The third test was to see how the ExpoDiscs performed in-studio with skin tones.

I don’t think there’s much to say. The ExpoDisc white balance filters gave me accurate color right out of the camera. I shot all these tests as JPG, not RAW, as usual, without any manipulation. I have to say I’m impressed and I will be keeping these in my bag along with my other must-have items for any shooting conditions.

Recommendation
By far, the ExpoDisc is the easiest, most efficient way to obtain accurate color balance. It comes with a lanyard you can wear around your neck so you always have it with you, and a pouch that you can wear on your belt (nice thing about the pouch is that it can hold two ExpoDiscs). I opted for the pouch while I was testing. Whenever I changed lighting conditions, I slapped an ExpoDisc on the end of my 28-70mm, snapped toward my light source, redefined my target and went back to shooting all in less than 15 seconds (a few more depending on the size of lens shade). When I finished, I tucked the filter back into the pouch on my hip. Talk about easy.

The ultimate payoff comes during post-processing. Opening images in a photo editor and seeing the color you expected is a wonderful feeling because that’s one less thing you need to correct for. Some may say color balancing in a program like Adobe Lightroom or Apple’s Aperture is just as easy; all you have to do is select all your images and sync them with the one you already balanced. There’s truth to that, but consider this, if you’re adding or removing lights and reflectors around in a studio setting or the clouds thicken outside, your color balance off could be thrown off. It’s much more pleasant to open up the image, see the proper color and move on to any other editing your images require instead of monkeying around with color balancing each image.

I recommend the ExpoDisc to all photographers concerned with capturing accurate color in their images. The small investment of this purchase will pay dividends in its worth down the line in time savings and processing headaches.