The Advantage of Shooting in Raw

There are many advantages to shooting in raw format rather than JPG.  There are also disadvantages such as the extra storage space, but the positives outweigh the negatives.  I am going to focus on one advantage: white balance colour correction.

I do not currently have a light table of my own for doing back lit photos.  My daughters however do, sort of. They each got a light table for Christmas as part of a fashion designer kit toy.  The light is produced by LEDs under a translucent plastic top.  The LEDs are very, very blue.  Let's call them almost purple.

I decided to give it a try and here is my first result after correcting the colour and processing.  It was cropped slightly and sharpened.

Not bad of a result.

I tried it again and for this I have a before and after:

As you can see there is quite the difference.  This one I also had to increase the exposure as I was only using the light table and natural light coming in the window.  It was getting dark outside.  I also used a large white envelope as a reflector.

I use Lightroom for my processing.  To correct the white balance I used the eyedropper tool to select an area.  The colour temperature gets adjusted up to around 19,000K!  It is not perfect, but I could probably work on these a  bit more.  The next time I use the light table, I am going to try to use a grey card and set a custom white balance in the camera and see how that works.