5 tips to perfect your whites

It’s a question I’m asked almost daily, ‘how do you get your whites so white?’ which sounds like an advert for washing powder, but is actually the bain of many photographers lives.

Whites are tricky, no actually that’s me being polite, shooting against white is a fu*king pain in the bum.

Honestly of all the colours I could have specialised in, I chose the hardest blimming one.

The problem with white is that your eye instantly recognises it, there is only one white & if it’s not right in an image then the whole photo looks off.

What I did when I very first started & a pitfall I see many photographers fall into, is to brighten the image so much that they lose all the detail & the tone in the babies skin.

The white background looks bright & gleaming, but the baby looks totally washed out.

Simply making your image so bright it hurts the viewers eyes is not the way to get lovely whites.

So I thought I’d jot down my top 5 tips to hopefully help others with the dreaded challenge that is shooting against white.

1. Gradients are key

The more gradients from light to dark in your image, the more depth, colour & tone you’ll maintain, whilst still being able to have lovely bright whites. The area closest to the light should be bright & white, but then there should be a beautiful gradient from light to shadow across the rest of the image.

2. Flat light is the enemy

Photographers generally avoid flat light anyway as it can look a bit ‘meh’, but when shooting against white it’s even more vital. If the light is flat across the babies face, then you’ve got no flex at all to then brighten the whites, because if you try to lift the highlights you’ll simply lose every bit of detail & tone from babies skin.

3. Celebrate shadows

I aim for ‘Rembrandt’ style of lighting in my images, which is unusual as this style of lighting is usually best suited for low-key (darker) photography & is notoriously tricky to achieve with natural light. But it’s the contrast with those wonderful shadows that I’m drawn to & find works really well with white.

So I generally try to have the baby sat at a 45 degree angle to the window/light & my aim is to have the light coming across one side of babies face, with the other side in shadow apart from a triangle of light falling under the eye.

This allows me to retain all of that lovely detail in the skin on the shadowy side, but flex to raise the highlights & sometimes mid-tones on the brighter side of the image.

4. Forget colour casts

These are not the issue, ever. Lighting (which is covered in the points above) is absolutely key & if you have the lighting right then eliminating colour casts, if they’re there, is so easy.

5. Avoid bright colours

Because I shoot natural light I find my white balance is best on auto, but if someone were to come in wearing a neon blue t-shirt then my camera’s white balance would be all over the place.

Plus in an all white room that colour is going to bounce around causing colour casts on all the walls & the baby. It’s fairly simple to remove a colour cast from a white wall, but can cause issues trying to adjust babies skin tone to remove the rogue colour cast.

There’s also the fact that in an all white room a bright t-shirt is going to stick out like a sore thumb & surely the focus of the image should be on the baby & not what’s being worn.

So those are my top 5 tips & in all honesty I’ve only really skimmed the surface & could ramble for days about the angles, positioning, editing, diffusion needed to help achieve the whites I like.

But hopefully there’s a tit-bit or a nugget in there that you’ll find useful & interesting.

Happy shooting, Suzi x