Any tips on getting good color balance faster or is it just experience?

If you take a photo in a light condition different from your film balance shooting a can of coke won't help because if you balance the print to make the red look as close as the original all the other colours will be off. Shooting a grey card won't help either. Technically it is not possible to achieve perfect colour balance if your subject is not lit by the right colour temperature light. You can get a decent rendition of the colours but it is a matter of personal taste. This is true in digital photography as well.

bvy said:

That's normal.

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Thanks.

You should definitely be trying to learn color balancing with good negatives, ones known to have already made good prints or ones shot under the proper color temperature, i.e., standard daylight or electronic flash, and properly exposed.

Berri said:

If you take a photo in a light condition different from your film balance shooting a can of coke won't help because if you balance the print to make the red look as close as the original all the other colours will be off. Shooting a grey card won't help either. Technically it is not possible to achieve perfect colour balance if your subject is not lit by the right colour temperature light. You can get a decent rendition of the colours but it is a matter of personal taste. This is true in digital photography as well.

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Ahhh.
I guess that this is why folks use cinestill film or filters indoors.

RPC said:

You should definitely be trying to learn color balancing with good negatives, ones known to have already made good prints or ones shot under the proper color temperature, i.e., standard daylight or electronic flash, and properly exposed.

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Ill do that.

Another aid to getting an almost consistent colour balance is to make what we call a 'Ring-a-Round.

To make one of these you have to make a print which is accurate and balanced in both colour and lightness/darkness/contrast and fasten it in the centre of a board.

Then make a series of prints, using the same settings but altering the filtration to give a +5, a 2nd to give a +10 and a 3rd to give a +20 with a red bias. and fix these prints on the same board at say the 12 o'clock position. Now make a second series of say green and fix them at the 6 o'clock position. Do the same with the other available colours and fasten them so that one colour is directly opposite so the yellow will be opposite blue, magenta will be opposite green etc, so on and so forth.

If these comparison images are printed then checked in daylight once they are dry, there is no need to have a daylight colour inspection bulb in the darkroom.

The biggest aid to accurate colour is to standardise. Film, negative developer, paper and paper developer. Also bear in mind, the colour balance from different boxes of paper may show a colour difference, so using the ring-a-round you can alter the filtration as needed.

Another important thing to remember in colour photography, especially under artificial light, is that the colour balance my simply not be even across the entire scene. (or duration of the shoot.)

Some of the lighting you can find in old arenas for example are especially nasty, as they will not only colour cycle several times a second causing different colour balance levels, but the lights won't even be in sync with each other and the shifts will 'wander around' the scene from frame to frame.

Extra "Added Fun" may be found in some lighting gear that goes through noticeable thermal cycling cycling. They'll heat up while they're on, begin to overheat, thermal throttle themselves back down, and then start the process over again, all the while throwing out a slightly different lighting. Their cycles can be a few seconds to several minutes long.

Some of the newer LED stuff isn't much better, as they'll use a low-frequency pulse width modulation rather than a high frequency to adjust the brightness and/or colour, which means weird flickering brightness/colour shifts from frame to frame/light to light. And since they're tied to their own internal clock cycle, you can't even reliably choose a shutter speed based on mains frequency to get around them.



In some cases you can play around with blending different colour balance exposures across the image, but in other's you're likely better off picking a single area and dialling that in with proper corrections while letting the rest of the image fall as it will.

Weird location lighting can make investing in high powered flash gear a very tempting venture.

Sitting down to review long duration bursts from my 7D, taken just to capture the lights shifting, has been a very interesting lesson in what is actually going in some venues.