Thank you for Making a Hard Decision Easy

As I work to become capable of producing photos that aren’t appalling, I go to Internet sources and learn from self-proclaimed experts. One of the problems with this is that they contradict each other, and some of them give advice which is just plain bad. As a beginner, I am not competent to detect bad information right off the bat. It takes me considerable time, research, and shooting. I think some of the good info is starting to solidify.

White balance has always confused me. I didn’t know what the term meant, and of course, I didn’t bother looking it up or trying to understand it. I was content with being annoyed about it. I think I understand it fairly well now.

Let’s start with the fact that it’s a stupid term. It sounds like you’re trying to do something that somehow balances white areas of your photos. In reality, it’s just light temperature, measured in Kelvins. They should just call it light temperature. When you buy a TV or light bulb, they call it temperature, so why not do the same thing in camera terminology? If they had called it temperature in the first place, I would have understood.

So what is light temperature?

Physicists have noticed that every solid substance radiates the same type of light when heated to a given temperature. When something is red hot, it gives off light concentrated in the red and orange area. When it’s white hot, the light is shifted toward the blue. This is true of iron, rocks, lead, or whatever you choose. It’s a universal thing.

Men who smelt metals developed a tool called a pyrometer. It measures the temperature of molten metal visually. They look at metal through these tools, and the tools show them colors to compare the metal colors with. Those colors match known temperatures. Easier than sticking a thermometer in there. I don’t know if pyrometers are still used, but it demonstrates the principle.

One weird thing about light temperature is that cold temperatures look warm, and hot temperatures look cold. An old incandescent bulb in your house gives off a nice, cozy glow that evokes warm emotions, but the light temperature is low, providing more yellow and so on. Direct sunlight has a high temperature, but it makes photos look cold.

On top of that, there is no relationship between light temperature and air temperature, so you can be freezing while you sit in high-temperature light.

How does light temperature affect photos? Simple. It makes them look warmer or colder, more or less. Too much warmth, and the sensation is stuffy and cloying. Overly feminine. Too little warmth, and people look like cadavers under fluorescent lights.

In making a photo look too cold or warm, a bad temperature choice can mess up the colors. It may make white look blue or pink, for example.

It is possible to use a card to adjust your camera for a given situation so the colors look right. It’s an annoying process. I bought a grey card which is not merely grey but a very precisely measured grey. To change my camera’s white balance, I have to hold it in front of the lens and push various buttons. If I do this, the camera should do a good job of getting a “correct” temperature for the lighting in which I find myself.

The big problem with this, apart from the fact that I will miss all sorts of shots because I’m playing with the camera, is that the setting does not last. Say I’m under a tent. I take a shot inside the tent, and then I turn and shoot so part of the scene is outside in the sun. The white balance setting for inside the tent will be completely wrong for the second shot. If you move around while taking photos, like nearly every human being on Earth, you will have to set your white balance over and over to keep it in the ballpark.

Nonetheless, I was told this was very important. It’s not. Spoiler, I guess. It’s a stupid idea.

Cameras generate two kinds of files: raw and JPG. A raw file contains just about all the information the sensor can get. A JPG is a smaller file your camera creates by guessing how you want a photo to look. If that sounds crazy to you, because you know a camera’s software is inferior to whatever you can install on your PC for editing photos, you’re onto something. Camera-generated JPG’s are like TV dinners. They’re supposed to be good enough for the masses; for people who aren’t capable of editing photos and getting the most out of them. People who think Jack Daniel’s is good whiskey.

When you see a photo on the back of your camera, even if you’re shooting in raw so your camera doesn’t store separate JPG’s, you’re looking at a JPG. If you judge your camera by that junk, you will never have any idea what it’s really capable of. It’s like buying a Ferrari and only using the valet key.

Many professional photographers shoot in JPG, but here are some key things to remember: 1) most photographers are not trying to produce great images, and 2) most photographers aren’t very good anyway.

I have learned that professional photographers are generally not interested in generating photos that affect people deeply or which are of top optical quality. They’re grinding out B-minus shots by the hundreds in order to feed their kids. They take the same family photos over and over, using the same lights, in the same room. They go to weddings and shoot hundreds of photos per event, just to document what happened. They want to work fast, get jobs over with, and move on to other jobs.

When my son was born, a photographer who had a deal with the hospital showed up in my wife’s room and shot a bunch of photos. Precious shots, to be sure, but not very good. She sold us a zip file of JPG’s and went on her way. She has been doing this for a long time, but I take much, much better shots of my son, even with my phone.

I’m not a professional. I’m an enthusiast. There is a difference. When people see photos I’ve taken of my family, and which I have edited carefully, I want their hearts to break. I want them to feel the love I felt when I was shooting. I want the composition to be stunning. I want the lighting to be just right.

I have set my cameras to quit storing JPG’s, and I found out how to make my phone shoot raw. I’m all done with Budweiser. I’ve moved on to homebrew.

Are JPG’s useless? No. CAMERA-GENERATED JPG’s are useless. When you edit raw photos, you will generally create JPG’s from them, and those finished files are fantastic, because they were processed by your skilled eye, not by engineers in Tokyo who will never see them.

If you shoot raw, you will keep information that will allow you do fix almost any white balance issues. This is why I’m going on about raw and JPG. If you shoot JPG’s, your ability to change the white balance in finished photos will be very limited, and you may be unable to do it. You will also have problems fixing lots of other things. Just shoot raw.

So to recap the situation so far, white balance is color temperature, you don’t have to set it every time you take a shot, you should shoot in raw if you want really good photos, you should not waste space storing camera-created JPG’s, and you should edit your photos on a PC like a man.

What are you supposed to do about white balance, then? Use the auto setting. It will work for almost every photo.

If you’re a wedding photographer, forget all this.

There are some situations in which using AWB (automatic white balance) can screw up a raw photo so much it will have to be altered by AI or discarded, but those situations are rare, and you should be able to figure out what they are and set your white balance manually when you encounter them.

Most professional photographers shoot in AWB nearly all the time. Consider that.

It can be important to set your white balance if you’re doing certain types of work that have to be standardized in various ways, but you’re not going to do those kinds of work unless you join the grind-and-dump industry.

A touchy old guy on a photo forum looked at a photo I had shot and told me the white balance was clearly off, and this sent me off on a rabbit trail, trying to figure out how he could see that just from a photo. It turned out he had no idea what he was talking about. Other photographers (much better ones) told me there was no way he could tell just from the photo, which I showed them. By then I had wasted $14 on a grey card, and I had spent a session shooting bad photos while adjusting my white balance incorrectly. If I had relied on AWB, I could have bypassed all that.

I believe this is all correct. Tell me if I’m wrong.

Key points:

1. White balance is color temperature, which affects the perceived warmth of photos.

2. White balance can almost always be corrected to your liking in post if you shoot raw, so shoot raw.

3. Automatic white balance works nearly all the time, so use it nearly all the time, or else you will miss shots while you’re trying to set it.

4. Never listen to advice for wedding photographers.

5. Never listen to bad photographers.

Number 5 is of interest, since I’m a bad photographer, and I am trying to give advice, but I’ll ignore that.

In other news, I canceled an Adobe subscription Adobe signed me up for dishonestly, and I uninstalled both Lightroom and Photoshop.

I thought these programs might be worth the insane $720 three-year cost, so I signed up for a 7-day free trial. Of course, a week is not long enough to learn much of anything about either program. I opened Photoshop once. I used Lightroom a few times, and I liked it for certain things, but my impression is that it is mainly for professional grind-and-dumpers. “Smooth out those wrinkles and send Mrs. Garfinkel her portrait!” It seems to have a lot of prepackaged, gimmicky settings to make it easy to churn out polished, if cheesy, images. But I may be wrong.

I will never find out if I’m wrong, because Adobe is so unpleasant to deal with, I canceled my subscription.

When I signed up, I was offered two options: $19.99 per month or $239.99 per year. I picked the monthly option, thinking that if I couldn’t make up my mind in a week, I would pay for a month and accept the loss. It seemed like a good move to me, and I didn’t see any reason why Adobe wouldn’t sell people these products by the month.

Yesterday, I tried to cancel on the Adobe site. I was weighing several options. First, I could see if they would offer me a discount, and if so, I might go ahead and buy a year. Second, if no discount, I would pay for another month and then make a firm decision. Third, if I was feeling generous, I might just pay full price and buy a year.

The site asked me if I really wanted to cancel, of course. It said I still had a day left. I decided to leave it until today.

When I went to the site today, I was blocked from managing my account. This is something Adobe does to prevent people from ending free trials. I saw a little blurb saying I would be able to manage my account soon, with an explanation mark, as though this was great news. Adobe also said I had been charged, after telling me I had a day to go.

So Adobe had dropped a surprise charge on me while simultaneously blocking my ability to question it, presumably until the trial period was so long gone so they could say it was not reasonable to ask for a cancellation and refund.

I resorted to chat, and I got some guy with a name like Joreet. His English communication skills were abominable, and I think he tried to swindle me. Because he was so inept at communicating (perhaps intentionally), it is impossible to know exactly what he was trying to do. He told me they would give me two free months.

Naturally, I had questions. If they were giving me two free months, and I was on a monthly plan, what would happen if I canceled after those two free months?

There was no way to get him to explain this. I could not get him to tell me whether I had an annual or monthly commitment. I could not get a clear explanation of what would happen if I canceled. My impression is that like the website where I signed up initially, Joreet or Poreet or whomever was trying to make me think I was getting something I was not.

I finally got him to admit that my 7-day trial came with a yearly, not monthly, commitment, so if my subscription renewed, I would be on the hook for the rest of a year.

I couldn’t make him tell me what I had been charged. I never got that information out of him. When I asked him when the block on the site would be removed, so I could cancel through the site, he kept telling me everything was fine and that he could do it all for me.

He never told me when the block would be gone. I told him what I thought of his work, as nicely as I could, and I insisted he tell me how to cancel using the site. He gave me a link to the blocked page. He seemed mad at that point. I think they get in trouble if you don’t let them run you. I think Adobe coaches them and says it’s a major failure if customers stand up to them and don’t go along with their scamming.

Just guesses.

My patience ran out abruptly, and I told him to cancel and give me a full refund. By that point, he was out of jolly, comforting canned responses intended to keep me in the fold, so he canceled my subscription instantly.

I would probably have been willing to pay them full price for a year, but dealing with Adobe was so unbearable, I got to the point where I no longer cared about their software. It’s not the best, and some superior programs are cheaper. I discovered some helpful features in Lightroom, but man, it’s not worth tolerating the disrespect and lies. They can keep it.

I think the folks at Adobe are scammers who operate just inside the law, and I want their company out of my life because I am afraid they will keep trying to find ways to stick it to me. I just uninstalled Photoshop, Lightroom, and their Creative Cloud app (which I never wanted) because I am afraid that if I click on something accidentally, they will send me a bill and say I reactivated my subscription.

I have Photoshop Elements 2024, which has never been useful to me and is no good for editing raw photos and can’t create full-color images. I think I’ll uninstall it, too. For all I know, it has spyware in it.

In case anyone else Googles, “Is an Adobe free Photoshop and Lightroom trial a good idea?”, I’ll give my opinion.

1. Adobe dishonestly hooks people by making it look like they can pay for a month at a time, when they are really committing for a year. UPDATE: I will take this back, partially. They do this in chat, but their website does point out the difference. I was apparently careless about this when I signed up, and that is my fault, although they tout their trial in a way that is intended to encourage people to sign up hastily. It was dishonest of them to block me from canceling on their site, and it was dishonest of them to try to sign me up and charge me while I was blocked.

2. Adobe rigs its site so canceling is very difficult. This is normal behavior for tech nerds.

3. Adobe’s reps are inept and probably crooked, and a CR chat which should take three minutes will take 20, at the end of which you will be expected to take whatever bum deal they shove down your throat, even though they have consistently refused to tell you what you’re paying or what you get.

4. If you’re not a grind-and-dumper, you probably don’t need or want Photoshop or Lightroom.

I actually enjoy being forthright and unwilling to bend with people who pressure me and try to cheat me, so Adobe’s trashy approach might as well have been designed to make me quit. I flat-out told the rep his answers were useless and so on. I recognized all the patented gimmicks intended to make me throw up my hands, give up in exhaustion, and pay Adobe. I hate sleazy, disrespectful sales tactics so much, a boiler-room-mentality company like Adobe would have a hard time selling me five-dollar bills for 50 cents.

So that’s the news. I am going to put all my cameras on AWB, keep on using Photolab, and see how things go. I know Adobe will be happy to take my money if I ever change my mind.