You have already learned that the custom white balance function on your digital camera is the way to get great color, but what do you use for the target to shoot for the white balance? The Kodak grey card doesn’t give you great results, and it sure doesn’t travel well. The Expodisk does travel well but it’s so slow, pricey, cumbersome to use in most cases, and really only does a marginal job.
Your clients don’t accept marginal color so why should you?
For over a year now the photographer/writers from ShootSmarter.com including the famed architect of modern digital workflow Will Crockett have been testing and perfecting the perfect target for any camera custom white balance from a $300 point & shoot all the way up to the professional DSLRS that the students bring to shoot with at ShootSmarter Universty. Our efforts to find the best custom white balance target has resulted in the creation of the BalanceSmarter.
What is it? It’s a popup panel that comes in 3 sizes that you "take a picture of" to activate the custom white balance function of your digital camera. Each Balancesmarter has a digital neutral white on one side and a digital neutral grey on the other.
Can you see the center mark in the middle of each panel? That's for your autofocus to grab onto so you no longer have to fuss with turing your autofocus off and on again to make a custom white balance.
"I don’t know about you, but I am certainly guilty of turing off the autofocus to make a white balance, then forgetting to turn it back on during a photosession until I notice it around the tenth frame or so. That doesn’t happen to me anymore because we use the BalanceSmarter. One more digital problem solved."
- Will Crockett
