What color should snow be?

jfriend · February 27, 2008

I've got a bunch of skiing pictures show in RAW and I'm trying to settle on an appropriate white balance that makes the snow look realistic. Should snow in this kind of lighting be neutral? Be a little bit blue from the reflected sky? Or be a little warmer than neutral? In this particular shot, it was about 2pm and the winter sun was behind the skier.

Here are three versions. Which looks the most natural to you?

A

B

C

Tango · February 27, 2008

#A is what i would go with......my .02

SloYerRoll · February 27, 2008

A is closest.

What application are you using?
You shouldn't need to manually adjust. Setting auto white balance should nail the shot if you reference the snow..

jfriend · February 27, 2008

SloYerRoll wrote:

A is closest.

What application are you using?
You shouldn't need to manually adjust. Setting auto white balance should nail the shot if you reference the snow..

Lightroom. The first image was set manually by using the white balance eye dropper in LR on the snow. I'm not sure what you mean by using auto white balance and referencing the snow.

I guess the question I was asking is whether natural looking snow is supposed to be truly neutral or whether it should have a slight bias a little cooler or warmer?

aj986s · February 27, 2008

IMHO, #A seems to be the most natural snow. But what about the jacket; what is supposed to be its correct color? Its quite different in each of your 3 examples.

Andy · February 27, 2008

This is an important topic. I recall Rutt brought it up a few years ago, too: http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=5586

Of your three, A is the color.
B is too warm.
C is too cold.

jfriend · February 27, 2008

Andy wrote:

This is an important topic. I recall Rutt brought it up a few years ago, too: http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=5586

Of your three, A is the color.
B is too warm.
C is too cold.

Thanks Andy for the reference to the previous discussion.

It looks like the conclusion there was that snow is a color-less reflector and it reflects whatever light you give it. If you give it sunrise or sunset light, everyone will expect it to be warm like that light. If you give it mid-day sun, everyone will expect it to be neutral. If you have a mix of sunlit and shadows, the sunlit snow should be neutral and the shadows will have a blue cast. If you have only shaded snow, then it's technically accurate for it to be bluer, but the human eye corrects for that and we see it as neutral so you probably correct your photo to be neutral.

I think that means that I can find a non-blown, sunlit portion of snow and make it neutral and I should be OK. If there's no sunlit snow in the shot (it's all shade), then just find a representative mid-tone snow and make it neutral.

SloYerRoll · February 27, 2008

jfriend wrote:

I think that means that I can find a non-blown, sunlit portion of snow and make it neutral and I should be OK. If there's no sunlit snow in the shot (it's all shade), then just find a representative mid-tone snow and make it neutral.

Yup!

Duffy Pratt · February 27, 2008

In some shots, just clicking on a sunlit are will still leave the shadows too blue. The camera has a tendency to make the shadows of a light neutral much bluer than people tend to remember it. When this happens (as it often does in sunset shots of my white dogs), it can lead to some tricky post processing problems. I don't think its an issue in this shot, and agree that A is the best.

jfriend · February 27, 2008

Duffy Pratt wrote:

In some shots, just clicking on a sunlit are will still leave the shadows too blue. The camera has a tendency to make the shadows of a light neutral much bluer than people tend to remember it. When this happens (as it often does in sunset shots of my white dogs), it can lead to some tricky post processing problems. I don't think its an issue in this shot, and agree that A is the best.

Thanks all. By the way, this is my 10 year old daughter/athlete ripping down a double black diamond run in Utah last week. She can now ski anywhere I want to go and I suspect it won't be too long before she wants to go places I don't want to

:.

LiquidAir · February 27, 2008

On a sunny day, my first inclination would be to make the highlights white and the shadows cool. Unless its a golden hour shot (or yellow snow

) I don't think any part of the snow should be on the warm side of neutral.

A looks pretty good to me. You have a tricky situation here with your skiier entirely in the shade, but the snow looks a little muddy so I would be inclined to push this one just a touch cooler.

B is too warm

C looks like the 100s of skiing shots I took on Ektachrome. I am guessing that this one is daylight balanced. Perhaps because of my experience with film, it actually looks the most "natural" to me. That said, if I were taking skiing pictures today I would probably push them a bit warmer than this.

The monitor I am using right now is really bad for color, so take my judgements with a grain of salt.

pathfinder · February 27, 2008

I agree with LiquidAir, in that the much of the snow snow tends to be sunlit, but the skier is in the shade, and hence you have two competing area for correct color balance.

What I have done, is use the white eye dropper in ARC to find a color temperature, and then average that setting with what the camera chose in AWB or with the sunlight setting in AWR. Snow is a white reflector that reflects the ambient light, and hence the ambient light color temperature.

The bottoms of those skis look like they may be black - if true, and the skier is the subject, you might try clicking there for a color temperature setting also. This will almost certainly make your snow warmer though.

Snow can be tricky to evaluate also - Here is a shot of my son in the shade, backlit at Steamboat Springs. The snow in the shade is blue, but my impression is that even the sunlit snow is slightly blue also, but when I read the pixels of the sunlit snow, they are almost all truly neutral with equal R,G and B channels.

Duffy Pratt · February 27, 2008

I played with the A version a little, only in Camera Raw. I did some recovery on the highlights, and then switched to the HSL tab. There, for the shadow areas I desaturated the blues pretty strongly, and also the aquas. Then I darkened the luminosity of the blues a bit. This almost neutralizes and darkens the shadows.

Then, to bring out your daughter some, I added some saturation to purples, and lightened the purples just a tad.

BTW, if you apply white balance to the bottom of the ski, the snow goes green. Somehow, the bottom of the ski's are a dark purple. None of the other clothing gives a snow color that I would expect.

Which resort? I just came back from a week at Park City and Deer Valley.

Duffy

pathfinder · February 27, 2008

The sunlit snow measures ever so slightly red and the shaded snow measures ever so slightly blue.

Over all I think this looks very nice, Duffy.

jfriend · February 27, 2008

Duffy Pratt wrote:

I played with the A version a little, only in Camera Raw. I did some recovery on the highlights, and then switched to the HSL tab. There, for the shadow areas I desaturated the blues pretty strongly, and also the aquas. Then I darkened the luminosity of the blues a bit. This almost neutralizes and darkens the shadows.

Then, to bring out your daughter some, I added some saturation to purples, and lightened the purples just a tad.

BTW, if you apply white balance to the bottom of the ski, the snow goes green. Somehow, the bottom of the ski's are a dark purple. None of the other clothing gives a snow color that I would expect.

Which resort? I just came back from a week at Park City and Deer Valley.

Duffy

How funny. We skied three days at Park City and one at Deer Valley. We could have crossed paths, though both of those places are big. This picture is off the Jupiter lift at Park City.

Thanks for the thoughts on post processing. I can see how this shot would lend itself to the color sliders in Lightroom because the background will be largely unaffected by color manipulations that target the subject. I haven't really started to process any of them yet - I just started to wonder about white balance.

The one day I had my camera with me in a backpack (also the only day we saw any sun and it wasn't out that long), the only runs we skied were backlit like this so I had to take what opportunities I had. Photography takes a back seat to skiing in choice of runs.

FYI, the bottoms of the skis look black to me in real life, as is the face mask. The gloves are a dark blue. Her bindings have some pure white on them, but you can't see any of them in this shot. I might be able to use them as a reference in a different shot. I have no idea why neutralizing the bottoms of her skis would turn the snow green. Odd.

Duffy Pratt · February 28, 2008

It's been my experience that very small variations from black can give very wide differences in white balance. Anything from mid-grey through highlights tends to work better when using the eyedropper, though sometimes a near black will get lucky.

My dad is almost 80, and we stuck more or less to the groomed trails at Deer Valley. All the areas there are fantastic. I thought about bringing my camera and 300 f/4, but didn't have a day that fit. Maybe next year.

BTW, I've got to give credit to Andrew Rodney for using the sliders in this sort of picture. It works really well as long as there isn't any other predominant blue in the shot. In theory you could do the same by white balancing the shadows and then pulling back on the reds, but I haven't had as much success with that for reasons I can't quite explain. Before, I would do the same sort of thing in LAB -- and I still will when a pull back on the sliders has a bad effect on some other part of the picture. But this shortcut has saved me a bunch of time in sunset shots of my dogs playing on the grass.

Duffy

rutt · February 28, 2008

Well Andy didn't quite get the thread right. I've shot tons of snow by now, but haven't improved on the thoughts from here:

http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=60005&postcount=13

pathfinder · February 28, 2008

John,

Welcome back, I thought maybe you had passed on:D

I have missed your interesting posts greatly.

LiquidAir · February 29, 2008

pathfinder wrote:

Snow can be tricky to evaluate also - Here is a shot of my son in the shade, backlit at Steamboat Springs. The snow in the shade is blue, but my impression is that even the sunlit snow is slightly blue also, but when I read the pixels of the sunlit snow, they are almost all truly neutral with equal R,G and B channels.

Thats a great shot pathfinder. Snow in the shade takes on the color of the sky and on that cornflower blue day you can really see it. In the smaller shadows of the ski tracks the snow itself is providing much of the fill so it isn't as blue. Of course on a hazy or cloudy day the snow color will be much flatter.

Robinivich · February 29, 2008

As a Canuck who feels he can speak with authority on snow...

Direct mid-day sunlight should reflect as white, but shadows on sunny days should be reflecting the light they get, which is the blue of the sky. If it's overcast, it will all be boring and white, and of course golden hour has already been covered. Be careful in backlit shots not to underestimate how much of the light is coming from the blue sky, rather than the sun.

Of course, it all boils down to taste, really.

edknight · March 5, 2008

I'm a little color-challenged and get into trouble real fast using the CS' white dropper on the snow for all the "reflecting" reasons mentioned and a blue cast from haze at long distances. My usual approach is to use the gray dropper on some non-reflecting nearby neutral in the scene (rock, bark, clothes, etc) and let the snow and distant vistas fall where they may.

Living at 9,000' and with a several feet of snow on the ground, I'm getting lots of practice. There are several snow scenes on my landscapes and wildlife galleries.

jfriend wrote:

Lightroom. The first image was set manually by using the white balance eye dropper in LR on the snow. I'm not sure what you mean by using auto white balance and referencing the snow.

beetle8 · March 6, 2008

In refference to the title of the thread,
It is most definately not supposed to be yellow!!

What color should snow be?

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