Ask the Experts - Denny Harlow on White Balancing 03/03/2010
Three Important questions: what is the importance of White Balance, why not just use Auto-White Balance, and why not shoot a custom White Balance grey card?
White Balance is a process of producing natural looking whites in a photograph that also appear white to our eyes in person. The "color temperature" of a light source, which refers to the relative warmth or coolness of white light, must be taken into account. Although our eyes have a good sense of determining what is white in a scene, cameras often have great difficulty with getting it correct. Improperly done, the image can end up with very unattractive orange, yellow, blue or even green “color casts”, particularly in the skin tones.
Most modern digital cameras utilize up to 7 different Preset White Balance settings: Auto, Tungsten, Fluorescent, Daylight, Flash, Cloudy, and Shade. These settings can be very useful for photographers shooting under difficult lighting situations. Though most useful when used without a flash, our industry standard of professionalism requires the use of flash for fill in images, particularly on the subject(s). Ideally flash lighting converts the existing “lighting colors” in an image to one “consistent” lighting color of 5500-5600 Kelvin, (The exact color of natural daylight). Most people are very comfortable with skin tone being lit with this color temperature and find it pleasing when used in photographs indoors, outdoors, and in studio shots. Therefore we must mimic daylight lighting with our flashes. To optimize the skin tones in any image set your camera's white balance on the DAYLIGHT or FLASH setting!
Use of Auto White Balance, a highly touted feature by camera makers, can cause poor image quality that is very difficult to manage in the “color correcting” phase of image production. Auto White Balance is too easily fooled by other colors in the picture. For example with a subject wearing a red jersey, Auto White Balance will take into account the jersey color and cool that red down. The resultant skin tones shift towards cyan. For a subject with a blue, Auto WB would overcompensate and make the skin yellowish. Neither is a good starting point in color correcting for skin tones. Now throw in gels on the backgrounds, and bounce from your lighting, and you can begin to see that the magnitude of the problem is compounded.
Concerning shooting a grey card for a custom White Balance before each shoot, it's difficult to come up with an objection to doing this WHEN it's done correctly. In the hands of a skilled photographer, using a Custom White Balance after shooting a grey card can achieve excellent results. However, most of us aren’t that expert and don’t have the time to adjust for this process in changing lighting conditions or outfit changes during a shoot. Therefore in the interest of simplicity, we suggest to you keep it simple and set your cameras on the DAYLIGHT setting.
Below are examples of how the Preset White Balance settings on the camera effect skin tone. Compare the following images. The Daylight setting consistently provides your best color.
Comments:
01/03/2011 Perfect Shot Photos says:
Two questions actually....as a former referee and coach, most if not 98% of all sports require absolutely no flash! What steps and method of white balance do you recommend, especially when dealing with indoor lighting that cycles.....
Two where can we get a logo to post on our business site, once were are approved and received our badge so customers know we are among the few photographers who have met safety requirements and background checks.
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