Photoshop Tip: Setting a White Point Versus Setting Your Highlights

PHOTOSHOP TIP: Setting a White Point Versus Setting Your Highlights
By Rich Seiling

For many people, setting a white point is the first creative decision they make to an image. In almost every tutorial I’ve seen, the authors instruct you to set a white point based on a numerical measurement--or worse--an arbitrary histogram. Both of these approaches keep a photographer from making an expressive print. In my experience, setting a white point is a common cause of bad prints. What you really want to do is learn how to set your highlights.

Expressive prints are made by making creative decisions while ALSO using numbers and the science of photography to help achieve your envisioned result. Just “going by the numbers” and trying to reach some theoretical perfection based on an “expert’s” formula produces a boring print that is nothing more than a mechanical reproduction.

White point and highlights are very different. By definition, a white point is just that--the whitest part of a photograph. A white point can contain no detail. In Ansel’s Zone System, this would be defined as Zone X. In Photoshop, we call this 255 white, which means it has a value of 255 in each of the RGB channels.

One of the problems with setting a white point is that the number that produces white in a file, and the number that produces white on the final print, are two very different things. For example, any neutral value above 253 on West Coast Imaging’s Chromira will not reproduce. Therefore the ”white point” of Fuji Crystal Archive in our Chromira is 253. In practice though, this is such a light tone that it is seen as white to the viewer. In fact, on the Lightjet and the Chromira, tones higher than 247 look like white.

Every output device will have its own white point, and it will change if you use a different paper or profile. For non-neutral pixels, it becomes even more complicated to determine the visual white point because a given printer may hold a value of 250 red, but only 240 blue and 242 green. Similarly, a light yellow may not reproduce over 240, but a light red of 245 may translate properly. This means when you set a 255 white point, in reality there are a lot of lower values that are going to print as near-paper-white as well--and if you set your white point too aggressively, you will cause large areas of highlights to burn out.

So, setting a white point can lead you down the wrong path when you're trying to make a truly expressive print. What we really want to do is set our highlights so they have the brightness we desire, while also holding on to the image's detail. That means we’ll have to set the highlights at a value that will create something other than unexposed white paper.

This isn’t a process that can be made into a one-size-fits-all formula--but we’re supposed to be making art, right? Making good creative decisions is based on practice and experience. Even though physics governs golf, do you hear Tiger Woods talk about how he uses equations to make a putt, or do you see him pull out a wind gauge before every tee off to find the exact wind speed? No! He uses an intuitive understanding based on practice and experience that lets him do what he needs, despite all the variables involved.

The mind is a wonderful thing that can handle all of these complexities if you just trust it and let it do its job. Trying to take comfort in rules and numbers won’t work. We are trying to communicate emotion to the viewer--the emotions you experienced when you captured the image on film--a foggy forest; a stormy sky; or a dramatic sunset. No set of numbers or rules can encompass all the different subjects and human emotions we want to convey. Only experience can tell you what they should look like on each individual photograph.

My photograph above, Tuolumne River in Spring Run-off, made with my Fuji S2 6 megapixel camera last summer, is a good example. There are several critical highlight areas in this photograph. The largest area of highlight detail is the blurred whitewater, but there are also light granite rocks, and weathered wood (see close-up image below). In a small print, it may hide if I blow out these areas, but in a larger print it will be obvious and ugly if any of these areas become blank. And that’s where the rub of setting a white point is. There is no law saying I need a pure white “white point” in a photograph. Viewers don’t measure prints with densitometers, but with their heart. What matters is that it feels right--that the water feels like water, the rocks feel like rocks, and the trees feel like trees.

The way to make that happen is to ignore histograms and numbers. Instead, use a calibrated monitor to make visual decisions and confirm those decisions with a print. For this photograph, that meant NOT using levels and moving the white point to an arbitrary point on a histogram. It meant making a curve with the curves tool that controlled the tonal relations of the highlights and allowed me to nudge them into values that would render the subject in a tactile way.

Therein lies an important point that we’ll have to revisit at a later date: When making creative changes on photographs in Photoshop, setting white and black points are a minor concern. Our primary concern is establishing tonal relationships within the the tonal range of the photograph that create the experience we are trying to create for the viewer. It’s not a black or a white that makes the photograph; It’s how the tones play off each other that bring magic to a photograph. Making music isn’t about playing the highest note and the lowest note an instrument can create. It’s about the harmonies and rhythms made with all the other notes in between. Musicians seem to understand this, but many photographers must not because I continually see people teaching photographers to focus primarily on the end notes (the white and black points) and forget all the subtle tones in between.

In the case of this photograph, there is no pure white, because I need density to record all the delicate texture in the white water and the weathering of the wood. In fact, most of the “white” areas are at around 220 in RGB numbers, and the areas that approach specular highlights are in the mid-230s.

In the end, the numbers don’t matter--the impact of the final print does. Next time you work on a photograph, forget the white point. Instead, concentrate on making the highlights look and feel the way you want them to. Make prints and adjust your imaging decisions after examining them. This workflow will help you tell your story more fluently and succinctly. As a result, your prints will resonate and impact the viewer in a far more powerful manner than if you relied solely on rules and numbers.