The Gadget Guy

4. Michael Tapes' Products For Photographers

These next two products, WhiBal and Raw Without FUD, come from Michael Tapes, a professional photographer. If some of his instructional examples are any guide, he is a much better teacher and lecturer than photographer.

WhiBal G6 White Balance Reference Pocket Edition

WhiBal G6 is a simple white balance card. Tapes pronounces the product name "hwi-bal". I looked at the pocket edition, which is the size of a business card. It comes in a slipcase with a card to use as a stand.

The WhiBal kit comes with the card, a black stand, brief documentation, a slipcase and a lanyard. You can download full documentation from Tapes’ website, along with six video tutorials. The lanyard is way too small to use around your neck, and cannot be adjusted without breaking the keeper bead.

The free online tutorials, online user guide and included blurb answer two questions:

Why use a white balance card?

What makes WhiBal different from other gray-scale cards?

There is little else you need to know. You want to use a gray-scale white balance card to ensure accurate color balance and rendering. Your digital camera sensor doesn’t know the light source color temperature, so the subject incident light will have a color cast or other color artifacts. Using auto white balance is at best a compromise, and setting the white balance for outdoors or tungsten, and so on, is notoriously inaccurate. It is very easy to fool even a skilled photographer, and much of the time, normal-to-difficult lighting conditions render most cameras’ auto-white balancing ineffective.

One video segment shows a checkerboard pattern that fools even a trained eye into misjudging gray and white. Remember the Kodak gray-scale card that came with the old photographer’s pocket reference? That 18% gray card was used for exposure determination, not white balance. White balance requires a bright, light, neutral gray color. When Michael measured the current Kodak gray scale card with a Gretag Macbeth spectrophotometer, he found that, as with most cards, they were not neutral. Other cards do not have published specifications. WhiBal cards are individually certified within a small range to be accurate, on both a and b channels (a* and b* each <= +/- 0.5), with standard luminosity (L*= 75).

The WhiBal is waterproof and scratch proof, as the color is consistent throughout the card. This generation, G6, sports a sticker on the front surface that includes inch and cm scales; white and black point references; and a focus/resolution target. The sticker is also used to judge reflectance, since reflections are the only thing you don’t want when using the card. To use, simply take one picture of the card in the same light and in line with the subject, avoiding any glare on the card. In photo software, click on the card, and adjust the picture, and any other pictures to match the card color as a white balance reference. The videos, and particularly the user guide, walk you through this process, which works for both RAW and JPEG images. For JPEG image post production in CS2, Tapes provides a free downloadable WhiBal white balance plug-in on his webpage. The user guide is particularly explicit on how to use CS2 and RawShooter to do this correction.

WhiBal Conclusions

Half of the six WhiBal video tutorials seem more like advertising, but the other three are clear and provide very good information and details about how to apply correction in Adobe Photoshop CS2’s RAW converter. A beta guide shows how to do this in Lightroom. The instruction videos would be much better without the introductory overture music, and particularly without the keyboard noise. The online and downloadable user guide is a model of lucidity. WhiBal is simple, and a great tool for accurate color balancing. It comes with a lifetime guarantee.

List price $29.95