Why are correct colors / white balance important in Architectural Photography?

• When White Balance / Colors are correct, you don’t really notice it.
• When White Balance / Colors are off, you can’t “unsee” it and it can ruin the photo
• Architects want you to notice their work, not the color flaws or color casts

In general, to know if a photo is correctly colored, ask yourself:

“Are surfaces that are supposed to be white actually white in the photo?”

This photo (to me) has a perfectly-represented color space.  Nothing jumps out as being “off” or “un-natural”

However, this photo was a relatively easy one to get right color-wise.   All of the interior lights are off, leaving mostly natural-light to work with.   If you set your color balance correctly in-camera, this one is fairly easy to pull off with minimal correction in post-processing.

Here is a photo that is not correctly color/white-balanced:

Do you see the difference?  The 2nd photo is very cool and has some Cyans and Yellows where they shouldn’t be.     It really ruins the photo.  If you were to have not seen the first photo (that was correct) and just started with this one, you may not have noticed it quite so abruptly at first, but your brain would know that something is amiss, and it takes away from all of the cool features of the home that the architect and builder wanted to showcase.

Your brain should not have to work hard to understand a photo!

You can take an even deeper-dive into the science of color management to learn about cool stuff like irradiance, wavelength, color temperature and more.

sRGB vs. ProPhoto RGB vs. Adobe RGB

How to get correct colors with the lights on?

Architectural photography can come in many forms.    Many times they are the ultra-cool exterior photos like this one:

This photo represents one of the biggest challenges in architectural photography.  When a client asks for a “dusk” or “twilight” photo, it can be very intimidating if you don’t know what you are doing.  Most cameras will over-saturate (horribly) windows and make them a very nuclear-orange or yellow.  We don’t have the luxury of using controlled lighting with exterior photos, but there are ways to get the colors to work.

My process to get correct colors for those twilight or dusk exterior photos with windows

It’s pretty simple to me to get this look, but it takes some work.    I composite (use 2-3) different photos and then piece together the final image using selected areas of those initial photos.

• One photo edited for the exterior of the building, minus the windows
• One photo edited for the windows – I usually bring down the highlights, drop the saturation and bring down the yellows
• One photo edited for the sky (if necessary)

Then, in photoshop, I combine the photos.   It can be tedious and time-consuming but it’s worth it.   Nothing is worse than a blown-out, over-saturated, over yellow/orange exterior or dusk photo.

Here is  the same photo that was not colored, or edited properly

You can’t unsee it right?

Straight out of camera, the windows will almost always be blown-out and over saturated.  The camera simply has too many colors or types of light to manage and it is almost impossible for it to happen all in one shot, and without a serious editing effort.

How to get correct colors and proper white-balance with multiple light sources

• Photograph in RAW format
• Use controlled lighting or strobes to overcome color-casts from tungsten, fluorescent, LED, or mixed-lighting situations.  
• Photograph ambient-only (which can still be challenging).   Many photographers turn lights off when they photograph spaces
• Composite multiple images together to compensate for mixed lighting challenges (like the photo above)
• Learn advanced editing for color/correction for the editing software you use.  

A controlled light or strobe(s) can serve many purposes in architectural or interior photography

• Lighting can accent or highlight certain features of a space
• Lights, or strobes can mimic sunlight and create more contrast or depth to a scene
• A strobe or lights can help to eliminate color casts 
• Strobes can bring out details and minimize grainy or grungy photos
• Properly used strobes or flash/speedlights can help balance out scenes where there is harsh sunlight – usually coming in through windows

Here is a final example.   This architect wanted to showcase some details of this property, including these super cool stairs.  I used a 50mm prime lens and had some challenges to work around.

Here is the final image:

My challenges to get this colored correctly:

• There were interior lights on in the home that were not able to be turned off easily so there were some slight color casts from the Tungsten lights making the scene more yellow than I wanted.
• The top of the image had some blazing sunlight coming in, creating a very blown-out area of highlights up near the windows
• There were some blue-ish cats on the white walls in spots

How I solved the color issues in this photo

• I photographed the image in RAW format. This is a no-brainer for any serious photographer, but essentially, the image is captured with incredible amounts of color and light (dynamic range) information.  The file is huge, and it takes knowledge of photoshop or other professional photo-editing softwares to manipulate the file correctly
• I used lighting at the top of the stairs to balance out the intense sunlight that was creating havoc on that area of the photo.  I also used some softly-diffused (umbrella) lighting at the bottom to counter-balance the color casts in that lower area
• I captured 5 ambient-only images at different exposures to have every bit of light (dynanic-range) to be able to use in post processing

Here are the 3 Raw images I chose to work with to compile the final image.

These are straight out of the camera, unprocessed files.

 

 

Notice how the photo using lights is the closest in terms of color?

Here is a photo for a Recreation Center I did a few years ago for BRS Architects

They commented after I delivered the photos how happy they were with the stunning detail and colors.

I used some very soft external lighting in this photo to eliminate color-casts. White surfaces are actually white in the photo.

A side-note on this photo – I used a wide-angle lens for this shot.   I try to avoid going “fully wide” in any shot, but they asked for the whole space to be represented in this shot, and I did not have any room to back up further.  

Can you imagine if I had delivered this photo?

You just can’t unsee it, right?

Learn more about my Denver / Boulder architectural photography