From the course: Learning Your Nikon DSLR Camera

Setting a custom white balance

From the course: Learning Your Nikon DSLR Camera

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Setting a custom white balance

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- Not all light is the same. Different light sources shine with different colors. For example, florescent lights tend to run cool. While candle flames are a bit warmer. The human eye can typically automatically compensate for these changes. But, your camera often needs some help. The camera needs to calibrate itself based upon the lighting conditions. But, your camera can change the white balance by accessing its menus and then using the selector button to choose a white balance mode. I'll go ahead and press the menu button and you see that we have white balance here in the menu. We'll just navigate down to it. And press select. Now we have several different methods to choose from. The default value of auto is going to adjust the camera automatically to the scene. Your Nikon camera may also have an auto warm option which favors a custom white balance that's automatically set but runs a little bit warmer and this is good for skin tones. The next choice is a preset. Now this is going to allow you to adjust. And you see here that it's asking us to go ahead and measure the scene. We'll come back to that method in just a moment. Next, we have an option here for daylight. Daylight is great when shooting under natural outdoor lighting. Our incandescent option is designed more for indoor lighting bulbs, a traditional bulb. And it runs about 3,000 degrees Kelvin. Florescent is good for shooting under florescent lamps. These are the type of lamps you'll see in many office and school environments. And we also have an option here for cloudy which can be quite useful if it's daylight but more diffused by cloud coverage or for the flash. And this will automatically compensate when you open up the pop-up flash for that built-in flash. So if I were to take a picture now (shutter closes) the white balance was set for the built-in flash. Now, let's go back into menu here for a second and you see we also have the ability to manually dial in the color temperature. And there are several presets. And as you adjust the image will accommodate the scene. Let's go to something here. Little bit warmer. We'll go all the way down to the bottom. And you see we're now at the other end of the spectrum. And the scene takes on warmish tones. So, if we shoot under this lighting condition (shutter closes) the resulting image looks a bit different. All right, let's go ahead and actually be a little bit more accurate though. I've placed a white balance target in and then I'm going to zoom in on the white area of the scene. There we go. Now what we can do is go in and do a custom white balance. I can choose preset manual. And it wants you to to get the white inside of that target box. Choose measure and it will set the white balance for you. Now, we can continue to shoot our scene. And I'll just remove the white balance card, frame up my shot, and when I take the photo we have a proper white balance for these conditions. Now, taking the time to settle white balance is a good idea. If you do so, you're going to get better results in camera. Now remember, if you're shooting raw this is less of an issue. It's very easy to adjust white balance during post production. But, if you're capturing JPEGs, getting it right in camera is a very good idea. And the same holds true for video. If you're just getting started you can rely upon things like the white balance presets and they're going to often be good enough. But, for the most professional results take the time to set your own custom white balance. Now, the exact controls will vary slightly from camera to camera. But, just make sure you download your camera manual and you'll find specific step-by-step instructions. Taking the time to get it right means that the images will look that much better.

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