CBL - A review of the Color & White Balance Lens

A review of Colour and white balance lens (CBL) for use in digital photography to obtain accurate white balance.

If like me you started your professional photography career using film you might like me long for those simpler times and wish computers and digital technology had passed photography by. Back then my wedding photography involved shooting some reels of film, probably 120mm film but also 35mm film and then sending them off to the lab for processing. You worked with a light box, contact sheets, and a pile of the finished photographs and life was easy. Easy is a relative term, it probably didn't feel too easy back then but now you realise it was.

The big change that digital photography brought into your life was "work flow". Sure you had work flow with film but digital work flow is a quantum leap in complexity and the use of your valuable time. You don't get paid any more by the client but the work involved has gone through the roof, not to mention the extra equipment you need and its associated cost.

White balance

This brings me onto white balance. Without your daylight or tungsten balanced film white balance suddenly became tricky, and this is compounded by the increased expectation of your clients because of modern folklore like "its digital", "you can do it on a computer", "it's easy", and all the rest of it. I know old school photographers who would shoot digital when it first came out and employ teenagers to do the Photoshop stuff because as everyone knows kids understand computers better than us grown ups.

All well and good, except of course it's rubbish, white balance is tricky to get right after the fact and time consuming. As this is a review of the CBL lens and a comparison with conventional grey cards I am intentionally not touching on the various preset white balances and auto white balance (AWB) which typically come with digital cameras but suffice to say that at the time of this writing I find them unreliable and often plain wrong, I custom white balance everything. Once you are in this mind set it doesn't seem a chore, in fact you look forward to not having to slave away later on the computer. It is much easier and more accurate to get the white balance correct in the camera before you press the shutter release. In fact it is much better to do as much as you possibly can "in-camera", from white balance to exposure compensation to framing the shot so that we spend less time in front of the computer enabling us to claw back our evenings and spend more time with our families.

Grey card

Grey is a useful color in photography, very useful. Grey has no color bias, essentially it has no color. Black and white are extreme forms of grey. When using the Zone System and doing an Ansel Adams impression up some mountain the 18% grey card is your friend. But the digital photographer has another use for the grey card - color balance. Because it has no colour you can tell a camera what having no color looks like. In other words:

...in this lighting environment, whether it is ambient light, flash or a combination of the two, this grey card should not have any color, it should be a shade of grey...

CBL - Color and White Balance Lens

Clearly the darkest shade of grey, black, is of no use for white balance calibration. That leaves pure white and, well, grey! Enter the Color and White Balance Lens (CBL for short), a plastic disc which comes in various sizes, largely pure white on one side and grey on the other. Mine has a diameter of 110mm, aimed at professional photographers. Avoid anything smaller as you will have trouble filling the frame while holding it far enough from the lens to get sufficient ambient light onto it.

New technology, advanced optical technology, greater gradation, resolution and sharpness.

Such are the claims by the manufacturer in the instruction manual. Certainly the "white" side has an intricate pattern, including holes revealing silver reflecting surfaces. It looks high tech, but I'm not convinced. The reverse side is a plain light grey plastic with some equally grey ridges on it. The white and grey sides are supposed to be used for different types of lighting but I get similar results which ever side I use. The result depends on the angle it is held at the same as for a conventional grey card.

I use my CBL all the time, I essentially don't take a photograph without setting a custom white balance using it. For my wedding photography this means I use it all day long. For portrait photography the situation is quite different, since unlike wedding photography which for the most part involves taking photographs in frequently changing light conditions largely beyond your control, studio portrait photography allows you to have total control over the lighting and it is, or can be, unchanging.

Correct custom white balance

The CBL lens allows me to set the correct white balance every time using the cameras custom white balance function, or very nearly everytime, such that whatever else I might do during post processing, it isn't correcting the colour balance. I might apply filters to warm up or cool down skin tones but my starting point is a correctly white balanced image. I'm not using filters to correct photographs.

Expensive

Nothing in photography is cheap, and the CBL lens is no exception, it is very expensive. Well it is expensive for a plastic disc which is essentially white on one side and grey on the other. However in terms of the amount of time it saves you in front of a computer you might regard it as a bargain.

Grey card revisited

So it any better than a grey card?.

Probably not, but no worse either and it is certainly more durable except for the cloth bag it comes in, the draw string in particular was built to fail, mine certainly did very quickly. It certainly looks more professional at a wedding too where guests might just regard your dog-eared grey card as an improvisation and unprofessional. Of course it isn't either of these but ignorance makes for the greatest experts. However for this reason alone it might just be worth the price, you can also shock wedding guests by telling them how much it cost.

The acid test - if I lost mine would I purchase a another?

If you have read this far you will be wanting a firm commitment saying either a resounding yes or absolutely no way. However the truth is I don't know. When I first started using it I thought there was no way I could get by without it because it saved me so much effort during post processing, my work flow speeded up. But now I think a traditional grey card would produce skin tones just as good. For wedding and portrait photography realistic skin tones are the holy grail of social photography. I'm sitting on the fence at the moment, at some point I will probably climb off the fence and make a decision, but I might need to lose my CBL lens before I do so.

More details about the CBL lens can be found at www.cbllens.com.