It is critical to get the white balance in your images spot on, especially when it comes to photography for advertising and commercial purposes. Why? Because the images will be broadcast through various mediums including print, TV and on the internet.
What is white balance?
Ever had a photo come out looking like you have used a warming filter or cooling filter even though you haven't? This is most likely due to your camera getting colours wrong. You see your digital camera is not all that smart when its comes to knowing what the colour pure white should look like. This effects your overall image causing a colour cast, either with a blue tint or an orange tint.
Show me how it effects my image!
Here you can see the effects have incorrectly balanced jewellery photography. As you can see next to the correctly colour balanced image the difference is drastic.
How do we control white balance?
There are various ways of correcting white balance so the image is its true colour. Different cameras contain different settings to do this but I will base it on the cameras we use at our studio, the Canon 5D Mark II.
AWB (auto white balance)
Daylight
Shade
Cloudy, twilight, sunset
Tungsten light
White fluorescent light
Flash use
Custom
Colour temperature
The various settings are meant to be used in different scenarios. For instance if you are shooting in a building that has tungsten lighting you would set your camera to Tungsten light. This would tell your camera that the light in the image is warmer than normal so it will add cooler tones to the image which will compensate. As you can guess this is not the best way to correct white balance as it is not very accurate, unless you are under fast paced shooting conditions e.g. a wedding.
If you have the time when photographing it is best to set a custom white balance with the aid of a grey card. This is a piece of card about the size of a A4 piece of paper and is 18% grey. 18% grey is what your camera tries to calibrate the colour in your images to. If there is an orange light coming from a tungsten light your camera doesn't know this. We can tell it though with a custom white balance.
To conduct a custom white balance you must place the grey card in front of the scene you wish to photograph with the light hitting it. If you are using warming or cooling filters make sure you remove them before conducting the grey balance, other wise they won't have any effect. Fill the frame of your image with the grey card and set your camera to manual focus as your camera will find it hard to focus on the card. You need to be in a mode where you can adjust the exposure e.g. manual. Take a picture and check the histogram is bang smack in the middle like in the image below.
If it is a little over exposed or under exposed adjust the aperture or shutter speed to compensate. Once you have this image go to custom white balance in the settings menu in your camera and it will ask which image do you want to use. Select the one you just took of the grey card and your done. Now you have perfectly calibrated image for true colour. From the product photography team at Digital Exposure.
What is white balance?
Ever had a photo come out looking like you have used a warming filter or cooling filter even though you haven't? This is most likely due to your camera getting colours wrong. You see your digital camera is not all that smart when its comes to knowing what the colour pure white should look like. This effects your overall image causing a colour cast, either with a blue tint or an orange tint.
Show me how it effects my image!
Here you can see the effects have incorrectly balanced jewellery photography. As you can see next to the correctly colour balanced image the difference is drastic.
How do we control white balance?
There are various ways of correcting white balance so the image is its true colour. Different cameras contain different settings to do this but I will base it on the cameras we use at our studio, the Canon 5D Mark II.
AWB (auto white balance)
Daylight
Shade
Cloudy, twilight, sunset
Tungsten light
White fluorescent light
Flash use
Custom
Colour temperature
The various settings are meant to be used in different scenarios. For instance if you are shooting in a building that has tungsten lighting you would set your camera to Tungsten light. This would tell your camera that the light in the image is warmer than normal so it will add cooler tones to the image which will compensate. As you can guess this is not the best way to correct white balance as it is not very accurate, unless you are under fast paced shooting conditions e.g. a wedding.
If you have the time when photographing it is best to set a custom white balance with the aid of a grey card. This is a piece of card about the size of a A4 piece of paper and is 18% grey. 18% grey is what your camera tries to calibrate the colour in your images to. If there is an orange light coming from a tungsten light your camera doesn't know this. We can tell it though with a custom white balance.
To conduct a custom white balance you must place the grey card in front of the scene you wish to photograph with the light hitting it. If you are using warming or cooling filters make sure you remove them before conducting the grey balance, other wise they won't have any effect. Fill the frame of your image with the grey card and set your camera to manual focus as your camera will find it hard to focus on the card. You need to be in a mode where you can adjust the exposure e.g. manual. Take a picture and check the histogram is bang smack in the middle like in the image below.
If it is a little over exposed or under exposed adjust the aperture or shutter speed to compensate. Once you have this image go to custom white balance in the settings menu in your camera and it will ask which image do you want to use. Select the one you just took of the grey card and your done. Now you have perfectly calibrated image for true colour. From the product photography team at Digital Exposure.
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