Color white balance cards - where to buy?

[Joe Copalman]

I've been watching a bunch of night photography tutorials online and in a few of them, the shooters use custom white balances to get some pretty cool tones in their long-exposure shots.  One of them had a small book of white balance cards, with the standard white, black, and gray, along with a few colored cards as well.  I've been looking online at B&H and Amazon trying to find something like this, but can only find gray cards or white/black/gray sets.  Does anybody know what I'm talking about?  If so, do you know where I can find one of these books?  They seem like a pretty useful tool to have.

[Jay Beckman]

I've never seen commercially-produced cards intended to set white balance for anything other than 5300-5500K.

What I have seen is a standard card used in non-standard light and then you go into the camera and set a custom white balance based on what you see on an X / Y grid.  Then you shoot with that tweak so long as you're under the same lighting.

Alternatively, you shoot in RAW, place your WB card in the frame for your first few shots as you chimp your exposure.  Then in post, you use the WB eye dropper in LR to set your color temp off your first best shot and apply that value to the whole shoot.

IMO, in the "real world," there is an "Accurate" WB and then there is the "Right" WB so I personally favor the last option where you get what you want in one shot and apply that across multiple frames.  That's how I approached both the FiFi shoot and the Desert Splash Caravan.

Adding: Do not confuse a "Color Checker" card with a WB card.  While you can WB off a color checker, they're really intended for color-critical work where "Red" has to be 255 0 0, "Blue" has to be 0 0 255, etc.  They're intended to be used in conjunction with whatever lighting tweaks (modifiers, distance, power or gels) that yield such exact color fidelity.  They're not really intended for the kind of M*A*S*H shooting that we do.  Plus, they're expensive, they scratch easily and using one under mixed lighting renders their purpose moot.  (Again, just one opinion...)

[Paul Dumm]

Joe, is this what your looking for?

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/465286-REG/X_Rite_MSCCC_Original_ColorChecker_Card.html

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/768395-REG/WhiBal_WB7_PC_G7_White_Balance_Pocket.html

[Joe Copalman]

Thanks Paul, but it was like a hybrid of the two - a book of 5x7ish cards. 

This wasn't being used for accurate white balance, but more as a sort of filter-less filter, with the camera being told to interpret red as white or blue as white using shots of the cards + the custom white balance setting.  I'm sure I could rig some ghetto version with cheap posterboard, but so much of my toolkit is ghetto-rigged that it would be nice to have something legit for a change.

I'll see if I can find that video again and just shoot the guy a "Hey wear u get dat?" message (in Youtube-appropriate poor English, of course).

[CJPalmer]

I have been intending on getting one of the ColorChecker Passports for a while now.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/651253-REG/X_Rite_MSCCPP_ColorChecker_Passport.html

[jslugman]

I use Gary Box's Ultimate Gray Card. One of his books included the file and it had color gradations built into it to help zero in your color balance in post. We printed them out on one of the big Epson printers and checked them with the Eye-One color checking scanners so they were dead-on.

I like the 5x7 pocket solution though.