Welcome back everyone for my final segment on basic manual camera adjustments. We have covered the vitals in my previous posts leaving a real easy one.... White Balance.
Have you ever snapped the perfect picture set, and then got home to see it big on your computer only to realize.... crap, they are all orange (or another shade)?? The problem had a very easy solution... set your white balance! White balance is much like being colored blind! The camera isn't as complex as the human eye, so we must tell it what proper color is.
Light has many temperature levels ranging from cool to hot. If the camera is set for a cool range when the pic is intended to be warm... well... you get what you get! Everything is hinging upon what light source you are using to illuminate your subject. Let's see, you have direct sun light, shade, cloud cover, tungsten bulbs indoor (good ol' fashioned Thomas Edison bulbs), fluorescent lights (like an industrial building or garage) and FLASH.
Look on the back of your camera for a button labeled WB. In any manual mode or priority mode you can push this and adjust for your lighting. Did you push it? You will see the light scenarios that I mentioned above as well as AWB and Custom WB. We won't talk about custom White Balance just yet, but we will, I promise.
The idea when choosing the correct White Balance is just what it sounds like... to tell the camera what true white is, so that the rest of the colors in your picture have the correct hue to them. Gray Scale is another way to check/set correct color....but we will stick to white which is all that's necessary in my opinion.
Here's an example... when shooting in warm sunlight and the WB is set to Flash, you will get an orange picture because the camera (set to flash) is trying to warm up your image even more because using a flash strips the shot of color because the light is so stark. Or you're shooting with your flash heads and your WB is set to Sunny.... you lose alot of color. That's because the camera assumes there's plenty of warm sunlight (because that's how it was set) for the pic.... but in fact, the flash heads stripped the shot of color. So... a colorless picture. The same principals apply for indoor lighting with certain bulb types. Fluorescent lights can turn your picture green if I recall.
There's the AWB button! Automatic White Balance. It does work, somewhat.... but not perfect! So get in the habit of using and experimenting with the other settings. Photoshop offers SOME correction for a bad white balance selection much like the gels that some use on their lights. Gels cast a hue into the light changing the color temperature. If you throw a blue hue on an orange picture in Photoshop it may indeed "cool" the picture. Problem is... not all colors react well to the hue being added. It will correct SOME of the picture.... but not ALL!! Thats why you can add blue to yellow and get green, but adding blue to an off shaded red will yield purple rather than giving the correct red that was used in the shot.
So experiment! Try different WB settings for different light scenarios. That is a simple setting to use that gives a correctly color balanced image prior to post editing.
Simple I know.... but here's what I use:
Strobe flashes.... always the "flash" WB ( I will reasonably correct any of the background with PS if needed.. but my subject needs to be correct.
Outdoors in the sun or shade.... yep... I use AWB.
No flashes indoor with regular bulbs....tungsten.
I try not to shoot fluorescent with available room light LOL. But the setting works!
And off camera flashes (or on).... Flash setting indicated by a lightning bolt/arrow symbol.
Stay tuned, we are just getting into the meat of things! Next up will be a segment discussing a readers submitted image and then a "goods and bads" for each manual camera adjustment.
Until next time ;)
~Tommy Post
Tommy Post Photography
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