From the course: Improved Video Conferencing with Digital Cameras

Getting the color right

From the course: Improved Video Conferencing with Digital Cameras

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Getting the color right

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- [Instructor] One of the great things about a digital camera compared to your FaceTime camera or even most of the webcams is that you have more control over the color. (laughs) And that's a big deal. And I mean, white balance specifically. Here's a shot where my skin tones look to me normal. This is the way that I think I look most of the time. And here's a shot where, well, a lot of things are going wrong here, of course, but one of them is the white balance is all off. And so it's a contributing factor to the overall disaster of this image. One of the things I like about digital cameras is that we have control over this situation. And the way that we do that, well, there's actually two ways. One is through the lighting we set up and then the second is the white balance setting on our camera. And that's what you want to look for. You want to look for white balance. When you find it, you'll find a bunch of presets. Generally speaking here's shadow, cloudy, incandescent and then auto. And auto is a great place to start for most situations. As you can see, we have a nice, true gray right here. That's what we want. That neutral gray. And that's when you know that you have a nice white balance setting. Of course, that is if you're pointing it at something that's gray (laughs) or white or neutral. Now, here's the way you figure this out. First of all, what is your lighting that you're using for your video conferencing? If it's incandescent, in other words if it's light bulbs, regular light bulbs, those are very orange and yellow. So you would go to the incandescent white balance setting which is very blue. The thinking is that you offset that orange with this strong blue. If you're using let's say a north facing window for your main light, well, the light usually coming in from a window is bluish, right? Light in shade is bluish. And you want to offset that bluish because that's not really great for skin tones with either cloudy which is a mild warming filter or shadow which is a little stronger warming filter. So again, what you're trying to do is figure out your lighting and then compensate for it with one of these presets. Now, if your lighting is mixed, I would definitely go to auto because auto probably will do the best job of figuring it all out and giving you the best overall result. But play with this. So the two key factors are try to be consistent in your lighting. In other words, try to use the same lighting set up every time and then figure out the best white balance setting with your digital camera for that lighting setup that you have. Again, this is a huge advantage of digital cameras over webcams and FaceTime cameras, is that we can actually control the color of the scene. And I tell you, color makes a big difference when we're looking at each other on these video conferences.

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