What is the TRUE COLOR DISC? The True Color Disc is a white balance filter that has been designed and calibrated to be one of the most accurate tools for customizing white balance on DSLR cameras. It is a simple device that is easy to use, and the resulting images often surprise you with clean, natural and realistic color rendition that in turn brings about improved color fidelity. We offer them in two types, TRUE COLOR DISC neutral and TRUE COLOR DISC warm. The TCDn is good for general photography, while TCDw is preferred by many digital shooters for portraits.   The TCDn and TCDw are products in their best form and substance. Unlike some of the reflective types of gadgets for customizing white balance on DSLR, incident measurements through the critically corrected ¡®light-filtering discs¡¯ of the TCD white balance filters constantly put out predictable and reliable results even in very tricky lighting conditions. Its ¡®light-filtering disc¡¯, molded of reinforced plastics, has its own patented inner structure that can effectively gather ambient light and convey its accurate color value to the lens and through to the image sensor of your DSLR camera.   They are rugged pieces of products, too, since they are made of reinforced plastics and aluminum alloy. It is actually very difficult to break a TCD white balance filter under normal environments of photo taking. The ¡®light-filtering disc¡¯ and the ¡®aluminum rim¡¯ are assembled and glued together so that they stay that way semi-permanently. And of course the disc made of reinforced plastics will not be broken or shattered unless maybe you strike it with a hammer or something like that. As a matter of fact, we perform drop tests at our factory where we drop 1 out of every 50 pcs from the height of 10 meters. The TCDn and TCDw are products that are made to serve you for a lifetime.   (Please visit TRUE COLOR DISC neutral and TRUE COLOR DISC warm pages for more information about them.)

The two images of CI Kim¡¯s Numbers¡¯ Dream 8075, a simple and innocent work that is making a good use of the artist¡¯s colorful (pun intended) sense of humor, show how a good white balance filter like TCDn can make subtle but meaningful differences in terms of color rendition even on the images captured in clean midday sunlight that is known to be one of the most favorable lighting conditions for photography. Fujifilm S5Pro, that happens to be my image taking machine of choice, is notorious for its accurate auto white balance. But the image on the left that was taken using that famous AWB shows colors that are a little thicker and muddier with more yellow and green. In case of the sky, especially, we can see immediately that the color is reduced in clarity and fidelity. Did the camera¡¯s AWB algorithm overcompensate the effect of the clear blue skylight in the early afternoon hours? Or was it the effect of the near-high-noon sun? In any case, the slight excessiveness of yellow-green prevailed in all of the images taken on that day using the camera¡¯s AWB.   Meanwhile, the image on the right, taken using the manual white balance customized with the aid of the TCDn, shows cleaner and truly neutral colors. The improved clarity and accurate tonality are apparent in all of the colors appearing in the image - blue, yellow, green, red as well as the ivory of the building in the background. I know it is not a big difference, but isn¡¯t it also true that, on such a fine and brilliant autumn day, we cannot easily give up on the hope of capturing the best looking colors including the cleanest blue of the sky?

The same day, same hour, same place. The same ¡®warm vs. neutral¡¯ color tones are repeated in the images of the Chinese artist Wang Guangyi¡¯s powerful steel sculpture, Materialist II. A friend of mine to whom I showed these two shots said he preferred the warmer color rendition that emphasized the rusty feeling of corroded steel on the left image. However, when color accuracy is important, you are on the money with the cleaner, more neutral color balance on the right.   (To see more ‘before & after’ images, please visit WITHOUT AND WITH and TCD ON THE GO pages.)

But do I really need it? The two images below answer the question with the dramatic difference of colors between them. They were taken at a vantage point up on the Taejosan, a small mountain (422 m) overlooking the city of Cheonan. It was still the same day but about 4 hours after the Arario Sculpture Square. I hiked up the mountain and arrived at this limestone rock called ¡®Bald Head¡¯ when the sun was about to set. I made the two images - one on auto white balance mode and the other on manual. Because the lighting was different from that at the Sculpture Square, I reset the custom white balance on my camera. Since the setting sun was the main light source, I took the reference image for customizing white balance by aiming the lens at the sun with TCDw placed in front of it and releasing the shutter. I used TCDw this time because I wanted to retain some of the warmth of the evening sunlight. 

Difference between the two white balance options is much greater here under the setting sun. I am not sure why, but the camera¡¯s auto white balance does not seem to have work at all. Was it still trying to compensate against the blue sky in the background? Or was it trying to recreate the color of the orange sunlight truthfully? In any case, the auto function is apparently losing the game here and the shinning winner is the manual white balance that was customized with the aid of the TCDw. I just love the warmish blue or bluish warm color that illuminates ¡®Bald Head¡¯ and interplays with shadows, making it look as if the ¡®Bald Head¡¯ is growing hair.   (Please visit WITHOUT AND WITH page for more comparison images made on sunset hours.)   But do we not have RAW? Yes, you are right. We do have RAW. You can comfortably depend on that flexible ¡®non-format¡¯ image file when it comes to, among other things, white balance/color temperature control. But it is also true that RAW always works better when the file is created on the basis of accurate white balance and optimum exposure in the first place. As a photographer with the Flickr ID ¡®childish_davis¡¯ observed, ¡°RAW doesn't solve the (white balance) issue completely. The WB is done in part in the analog signal processing before the quantization (A/D conversion). You lose quality if your WB is way off and you adjust it later in the RAW conversion.¡± Not particularly because of what childish_davis says, but I am still sorry for having lost the chance to make a custom white balance version of the image below. It would have been nice to have a CWB version, maybe even just for comparison¡®s sake. Actually I tried to make one, but while I was changing my camera¡¯s white balance mode from ¡®Auto¡¯ to ¡®Preset¡¯ (¡®Preset¡¯ being Fuji¡¯s name for ¡®Custom¡¯), the girl walked away and a noisy group of fast-moving people swarmed the scene, breaking the serenity of what I was seeing and hearing in front of me moments before. I lost interest and moved on without trying another shot.

A Slow Walk in the Palace: Back to the Gyeongbokgung, the main palace of Joseon Dynasty. This was not the same Sunday but a week after the day I had made the shot of the colorful eaves decorated with ¡®danchong¡¯ painting. The girl in the center foreground was walking very slowly as if she was counting her own footsteps. I was there minding about another frame when I saw her and a good picture around her. I instinctively turned my camera toward her and clicked the shutter. I was lucky to capture her in this expressive pose. Although she was walking very slowly, the moment she was in this photogenic posture was yet a fleeting one. I would not have made the shot if I was one moment too early or one moment too late. The image was taken using the camera¡¯s auto white balance and processed at Adobe Camera RAW.   The camera¡¯s auto white balance function did a pretty good job on this one, anyway, and I could get this nice image after brightening it up a little and cooling down its color balance just a tiny bit at the Adobe Camera RAW. I guess the auto mode hit the bull¡¯s eye because it was basically a fine day, and the cold color of the sky and the warm colors of the ground and buildings were sharing the scene in more or less equal proportion.   In less favorable conditions, anyway, it is all the more important to include in your RAW files some good white balance information obtained with the aid of reliable white balance filters like the TCD. Especially for those new comers to the world of RAW post-processing, the proper white balance value embedded in RAW files can be useful reference data to base their color balance decisions on. RAW post-processing is like sailing in the open sea of images and the properties that make up those images. It really helps to have something that guides you just like a buoy or a lighthouse guides seamen, particularly when you have lots and lots of images to go through.   I would not say it would be terribly difficult even for the inexperienced to arrive at something like the second or the third image below from the first one. But it would not be terribly easy either. Unless you have a sense of perfect color like some people have sense of perfect pitch, you will be able to arrive at an ideal color balance only after some trials and errors that are always tiring and time consuming. And even when you have arrived there, you would not know if it is any better than the images you could have got with the help of the white balance properly customized for the given lighting condition.

Among the three shots, I like the middle one taken using the white balance customized with TCDn, but the one on the right looks gorgeous, too. The one on the left is also very good, but the slightly purple tone can lead to negative reactions. I made the shots when I dropped by a Buddhist temple on the way down from the ¡®Bald Head¡¯ on that fine autumn day. The sun was already set, and the beautiful clear blue sky of that particular day was beginning to darken from the eastern end, displaying progressive spectrum of its dark-to-light hue of the sunset hours. Although there was some orange color remaining at the western rim of the sky, it was losing its luminance as the whole sky was dimming minute by minute. My hands moved fast to make the shots within the shortest possible intervals.   What about artificial lighting? Auto white balance modes of digital cameras often produce unrealistic color casts in the photos taken under artificial lighting. In fact, that is where custom white balance really shines over auto. The three images of Hymn, one of the works of the world famous British artist Damien Hirst, are good examples of what can happen to your images under artificial lighting conditions. Hirst¡¯s mondo enlargement of his son's plastic anatomical toy is standing there at the Arario Sculpture Square, encased in an over-7-meter-high glass hut with no front wall. At night, they turn on, on the ceiling, a number of what look like low-color-temperature halogen lamps, reflections of which are seen in the images here on the glass wall behind the half-peeled-off face of the gut-displaying dummy.

The photo on the left is a good example of distorted color tone that typifies the undesirable effect introduced by warm lighting to the images taken on camera¡¯s AWB mode. The AWB algorithm must have tried to compensate against the low color temperature of the warm lighting, but obviously failed here, just like it did at ¡®Bald Head¡¯ at the sunset hour. From the image in the middle, however, the excessive warmth is successfully eliminated. The manual white balance customized with the TCDn did a good job, showing the poor dreadful guy¡¯s inner organs in neutral and accurate color tone. The image on the right, which I personally prefer over the others, shows the TCDw¡¯s gentle warming effect. We developed the TCDw for portraits, but now I think it can be also great for other areas like still life and landscape. Anyway, the first of the three images below taken at an art gallery in Insadong of Seoul also shows similar negative effect created under warm lighting, while, together with the other two, displaying the differences between the color tones induced by three different WB modes.

Another threesome of photos below shows another kind of typical effect resulting from indoor lighting. This mart was illuminated with mixed lighting of fluorescent and halogen lamps. Customizing of the two different manual white balances were executed carefully in order to include the influences of those different types of lamps in the same reading. From the results, we can see the lighting on the whole was more on the cold side. The auto mode tried but could not overcome coldbluish tone that is witnessed in the first image. On the other hand, both of the TCDn and TCDw did handsome jobs here, reproducing the genuine feeling of warmth those soft and cute bears and cats give you when you hold them.

What do we need and need not? My last photo (below) for this article keeps reminding me how important it is to be prepared all the time with, among other things, the proper white balance on your camera. Shutter chances come and go in fleeting moments, just like the little girl when she walked up to the wall and stayed at that photogenic pose for a couple of seconds looking into the painting at the kissing couple, before running back to the direction she came from. At that moment I was squatted down in front of the wall, leaning my back against the opposite wall of the alleyway, trying to put the painting in a good frame. When I saw the kid, I just released the shutter and got this lucky shot. But my luck turned out to be a limited one because I was being lazy about WB setting in that afternoon. My camera was on a custom white balance mode that had been set somewhere else 10 or 20 minutes before. I was in the same neighborhood under the same skylight but surroundings were different, including the colors of the reflective surfaces nearby. And to make things worse, my camera¡¯s shooting menu was set on ¡®JPEG¡¯ only mode, leaving me with no option for more precise color temperature adjustment in a RAW file.

I do not think the color balance of this photo is good. The overall tone lacks warmth--warmth being one of the more important ingredients for this type of image. I tried everything to repair it in Photoshop but failed to get anything better than the mediocre result above. If only my camera¡¯s white balance had been customized with TCD at the site of the taking, the white wall in the picture would have appeared from the camera in warmish white tone instead of the ugly grayish white I am looking at now. This otherwise cute and adorable photo reminded me of the importance of the basic things. After this shot, I made it a rule to reset my custom white balance whenever I move into a different ambient light environment. I also double-check, from time to time, if my camera¡¯s shooting menu is set on ¡®RAW¡¯ mode.   Talking about RAW, some of you who swear by it may say white balance of your camera can be set on AWB and ignored forever as long as you shoot RAW. But there are others who say if you use a good white balance filter products, you can save, in the long run, enormous amount of time and labor in post-processing. In fact, that is exactly why I am hooked on our TCDn and TCDw. Color correction in RAW-based post-processing can be easy and simple sometimes, but other times it can get on your nerves and robs a lot of your valuable time. According to my experience, getting close-to-prefect color right out of the memory card greatly helps your morale and gives you ease of mind to experiment something extraordinary out of the ordinary. I really hated, in my pre-TCD days, those depressing hours I had to go through by grueling myself to get something ordinary out of the things that were somewhat wrong and miscalculated.   If you are more or less a JPEG shooter who wants to streamline your digital workflow and reduce the amount of harmful manipulations on your image files, a good white balance filter like the TCDn or TCDw is all the more recommendable to you, because they can help you produce images with proper color balance right from the moment of capture. They will minimize the need for destructive color manipulations on your images and can save those delicate nuances of color that may be easily lost with repeated color-correction in programs such as Photoshop. We take photos because we love and enjoy photo-taking, not photo-processing. Although we cannot get away from post-processing completely, most of us want to reduce the time and energy poured into it. Trying an accurate and well-made white balance filter can be a good start. I know that because the TCDn and TCDw in my camera bag have never disappointed me so far.