Hello and welcome back to Gmax Studios.
In the last episode, I promised
you that I would give you
the easiest white balance lesson
that you have ever seen, so here it is.
Before we start
on white balance, it is
very important to understand the
concepts of cool warm and neutral.
Any photograph that has got
bluish tones is said
to be cool, and any
photograph that has red
or orange tones is said to be warm.
A photograph with no tones
while all the colors appear
to be true is said
to be neutral.
So here is a cool photograph, I don't
mean cool in that sense,
I mean that it has got
cool tones to it, and
here is a warm photograph,
we say this because we can
see a reddish or
orange cast on the photograph,
and here is a neutral
photograph, we see that
all the colors in this photograph
are neutral and they
are true as they are supposed to be.
So it is very important to
understand the distinction of all these three tones.
So what causes this films to appear in a photograph?
If you look around, there are
lights of different colors all around us.
Even daylight changes its color
at various times of the day.
Now it is these changing colors that
cast a color on our
photographs, and this is
what confuses the camera because
it cannot determine exactly how
to render the colors, making
the photographs appear cool or warm.
Without getting into the complete
theory of color temperature, all
you need to know is
this - that most cameras
have a color temperature setting between
2,500 kelvin to 10,000 kelvin.
Kelvin is a unit
by which color temperature is measured.
Photographically, all that
we need to know is that
lower the number like 2,500 K
the colder or
cooler our photographs will
be and higher the
number like 10,000 kelvin
the warmer our
photographs will turn out to be.
In between 2,500 and
10,000 there exists a region
of pure white light
which is at 5,600 kelvin.
So actually as far as
photography is concerned, that is
all you have to remember and you have to imagine a flame.
The more you heat, the more
you increase the color temperature the
warmer your photograph gets, and
the lesser your color temperature
is the cooler your photograph is.
That is all actually that you
have to remember while setting white balance.
So for example, I have
this little toy which is
lit by this warm bulb
and it's casting a yellowish light on it.
The minute I change my color
temperature to 2,700 the
yellow cast is
gone and the white
becomes pure white, and this
is actually what you
need to tell the camera
that under any given lighting
THIS IS WHITE.
Once you tell the camera
that, all your other
colors fall into place
and this is exactly what
is white balance.
90% of the times, the auto
white balance of the camera
takes care of the white
balance but there are sometimes when you have to set it manually,
so how do we do this?
There are a few ways of
doing this depending upon the camera that you use.
The most obvious thing to
do is to go
to the white balance settings of
the camera and change it
to whatever lighting conditions you're
shooting it, but that
means memorizing all the
different kinds of light that you shoot under
like fluorescent, direct sunlight,
flash, cloudy, shade etcetera
because each of
these readings has a different
color temperature and will affect
your photograph differently and these
are just estimates, they are
not very accurate color
readings of colour temperature of
the light at that point of
time and they might
also differ from camera to camera.
So the best way to get
true colors under any situation
is to do a custom or
a preset white balance, and
the easiest way to do
a custom white balance is to
show the camera a
white piecevof paper under any
given light and take a picture.
A more detailed description of
how to white balance your Cannon
or Nikon cameras is given
in the photography tip section, you
can check it out there or
you can follow the links in
the description. There are
of course more specialized and
advanced ways of white balancing your
camera like using the
color checker or using the
expodisc which is a
specialized disk for slapping
on top of your
lense and taking a picture,
it is like a substitute for
the white paper only much more advanced.
We shall discuss all these other
methods at a later
stage, but the
real fun begins if you
shoot in raw and take
your images to a post
processing software like Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop.
You can tweak the colors to
make the photograph look completely
different from what it
was shot like, this photograph
for example looks like
kind of it's been shot
in a full moon night,
but actually the original photograph
is this.
So white balance is just
another way of gaining more
creative control over your photographs.
So strictly speaking, there is
no right or wrong, as far as white balance is concerned
it all depends upon the
mood that you're trying to convey through a photograph.
So this is the photograph of
a friend that I shot late
evening, and it's a
fairly nice picture, his skin
is warm because it's lit
by the street lights and the
sky is blue, but I
thought I'll push the envelope,
and I brought down the
temperature to 2,000 whereas
the camera had made
an automatic white balance reading
of 2,500 because that's what the camera is capable.
Now in this Lightroom I
can bring the temperature down to 2,000.
So his shot became
absolutely white, his skin
became paler but the sky became
much more blue, and with
a little a bit of tweaks here
and there, I quite like
the picture that I ended up with.
So as I said, some of
you might prefer the warmer
picture or some of
you might prefer this
cooler one, it all
depends on how you
look at it and what you want.
Usually if there is a
person present in the picture
or we're taking a photograph of
a person, we usually use
the skin tone to determine
how off the color balance is.
So that is all that there is to white balance.
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In the next episode we shall talk
about the various metering modes
that the camera has and I
will also tell you about the
most important button on
a camera. Until then, bye
bye.