I stole this trick from VFX artists

Sometimes it feels impossible to white balance a shot, but there's a simple hack every top VFX artist uses that we can steal to make white balancing any shot easy to do.

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[MonkeyRiot-uixb]

Brilliantly put! No one ever talks about the mental taxation side of it, and it’s a very real thing especially when you’re constantly having to adjust for non-linear color spaces. In VFX, because we’re so focused on matching external elements (plates, reference images, etc.), working in linear helps cut out a lot of the guesswork. You don’t spend nearly as much time fighting against weird color behaviors or second-guessing what’s “real.” In that sense, sticking to a linear workflow isn’t just about accuracy. It’s about freeing up mental bandwidth to focus on the creative decisions rather than the technical frustrations. In the end, it’s all about making your footage resonate with the viewer in a natural, “humanized” way.

[TheDistanceDuo]

Hi Cullen, just wanted to say a big thanks for this info. I'd never even heard of a linear gamma space, but using this method, I've just whizzed through the colour correction of the project I'm working on - in around half the time I normally would.
Really cannot thank you enough!

[purplemonkeyelephant]

Thankyou for acknowledging the spiral of self-doubt. Some grades I'm really confident and others I've gone down the rabbit hole of 20 grades, can be tough when difficult footage makes you lose your mojo.

[TeddyCavachon]

I started working as a photo technician in the National Geographic photo lab in 1974 where my job was creating halftones and color separations and that was the point that I started using control targets as a reproduction baseline.

In the era of film the most valuable tool a photographer shooting transparencies for drum scanning and color separations was a box of color correcting filters to eliminate color casts due to batch-to-batch variation in film or color biases in the lighting. For things like catalogs the camera transparencies would be duplicated in an enlarger (like making a print) to the size in the layout on film with a strippable emulsion so all the images on a page could be color separated at the same time identically. CC filters in the enlarger would be used in the making of the duplicates with color charts the photographers would include in the edges of every photo as a guide.

So not surprisingly when I started shooting digitally and editing in Photoshop starting back in 1994 I would photograph a gray card as a WB reference. It the early 2000s I started also draping white and black wash cloths over the card to use for setting my FILL (based on detail in black one) and KEY (keeping white one 1/3 stop under clipping) flashes and ambient + flash lighting to get a full-range, no shadow noise, normal ‘seen by eye’ contrast image as a starting baseline for editing.

The neutral color balanced, normal contrast look of the images wasn’t the end goal, just a consistent starting baseline for editing very similar to the approach I learned in B&W from the books of Ansel Adams. His images out of camera simply recorded detail everywhere, with contrast of sky and foliage often shifted unnaturally with color filters on the camera lens — red for dark sky, green for brighter than normal foliage. The artistic / editorial process in the Zone System was done entirely in the darkroom during the print making. The Negative was the score and The Print the performance.

Photographers and videographers make life far more difficult for themselves if they don’t take a the few minutes it takes to include a reference target in every shot and scene held by the subject or photographed in the same light. Using the black and white towels to set FILL and KEY lighting is faster and more accurate than hand metering. By using them in foreground and background it becomes trivial to set FILL levels so ALL the shadows in a photo or video are CAPTURED above the signal / noise threshold.

I always turn on and set FILL only as the first step because anywhere the camera lens sees a FILL SHADOW there will be a NOISE FILLED VOID in the lighting pattern after KEY and RIM lighting are added. Seeing and eliminating them is much more difficult when FILL is added last.

The gray card used today for WB should reflect 12% not 18%. 18% was the old ASA film speed reference value based on a ROT landscape that was 1/3 sky and 2/3 foreground reflecting 18% on average of the incident sun intensity. The ISO standard adopted in 1975 changed that calibration point to 12% It theory if you meter off an 12% card with a ISO calibrated reflection meter the SHADOWS will be exposed optimally. But with digital playback and histogram a test shot of a black towel is better for shadow exposure / FILL control and a white one for highlight exposure / RIM & KEY light control, keeping RIM light 1/3 stop under clipping and KEY 2/3 stop under when using both, or KEY 1/3 stop under if only using KEY over FILL.

[Onlison]

Appreciate your input, Cullen.
I learned here.

FYI at the end of your video the my suggestion and watch next icons are blank; you don’t have this enabled in your YT Studio friend.
Keep up the good work!

Onlison 🦁

[phpn]

You can use the Grey World Hypothesis : Take a frame, blur it (Gaussian) until the whole image is like one big pixel ; the colour you see is the colour cast you need to deal with. You can neutralise by reading the RGB values and then tweaking the linear offsets (or the gammas, which won't affect the black and the white points) until your big pixel is neutral grey. Works every time, except you have to make a decision : Perfectly neutralising every shot is NOT what you should do systematically.

[AmariRebel]

Yo! More value in 10 minutes than HOURS on other videos. Thank you!

[Kacz]

Great video! I'm a compositor and am very pro-linear.
It allows for you to not have to use your eye as much for tasks that are just simple arithmetic like white balancing.
We have tools to do white balancing with a single click by taking an area that we sample and equalizing the RGB channels while also accounting for any luminance changes that might happen from individual channel adjustment.

Just wanted to mention that we also like you, convert to and from linear/log depending on the task.
Our footage is always converted to linear for our working space, but sometimes that linear conversion causes values in our image that don't play well with our tools (super high or negative values).
So, in those cases, we convert to log, apply our filters/color/transformations/etc., then convert back to linear.

Keep up the great vids. I, like you, keep up with knowledge and workflows that other departments use to help us better work together, and this channel is great for helping unify us VFX artists and colorists who are so often at war, haha.
Cheers.

[LearnVFXcom]

Welcome to the party man. Happy to see a colorist take inspiration from VFX color workflows.

[glenis]

As someone who hates sitting in front of a screen for too long (I get lost in the weeds of color grading on DaVinci), this WB trick alone has made me not dread the process. Thank you!

[SchmidtyFilms]

I've been doing this for the last few months, and with your LUT packs it has made my grading so much faster. I shoot lots of run and gun, going into different lighting situations constantly and so colour balancing was a nightmare for me. Now I can easily match shots from different days, different times of day, different weather, no problem.

[seanvgmusic]

Man! This is the only white balance vid I sat through the whole video! Perfect presentation and teaching! I subbed instantly. Next I'll do, I'll watch your other vids! I honestly have the same struggle when color correcting/grading videos, matching and white balancing shots... and yes, the "spiral of self doubt"! You just instilled new confidence in me as a learner. Some terms I still try to wrap my head around (after years of missing out) but you sir just inspired me to open my Resolve's color tab (rather... the whole editing program) again! Like a reignited passion because I honestly gave up years ago including video editing altogether. Thank you.

[homeofcreation]

I have seen this video before and I am using this technique for quite some time but YouTube keeps recommending it which is absolutely fine. It's the best way to balance your shots and create a bit of a look.

[pjtavera]

I tried this and it is dang right fast for a quick turn around. It is now super glued to my work flow! Thanks Cullen 👌

[ectoproductions]

This is slick! I noticed though that there is something happening with the street lights in the car example. Looks like something is clipping there with the linear mode

[gabrielmichaelproductions]

Thanks for talking about that spiral of self doubt, this is such a great tip as I'm still a beginner in the color field. Thanks Cullen, great as always!

[ninkovicjosip]

Rarely these days i stumble upon such an informative video that instantly helps with my workflow! Thank you!

[ConnerJohn]

DUDE.... This is so awesome. I love the idea of taking out the mental spiral cause thats a place I find myself way too often lol. Super informative and useful information in this video!

[ErikWerlin]

So simple yet so effective. The funny thing is I used to do this when I worked in VFX (using linear gamma) and it never even occurred to me to use the same method in resolve.

[nvyden]

hi Cullen 😌 just wanted to say that I love your work and appreciate all you’re doing for the colorist community :)