From the course: Learning to Use Mirrorless Cameras

Setting a custom white balance

From the course: Learning to Use Mirrorless Cameras

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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, fluorescent lights run a bit cool while candle flames tend to be warm. The human eye can automatically compensate for these changes, but your camera needs some help. The camera needs to be calibrated based upon the lighting conditions. To change your white balance in your camera it's pretty straight forward. Now it'll vary slightly from camera to camera, but you'll likely have a white balance button or the ability to press a quick menu. Navigate over to the white balance settings. In this case you'll see several different choices. Now, let me remove our white balance card for a moment and let you just look at the scene itself. You'll notice under different lighting conditions here, things change pretty dramatically. Notice how as we see different conditions, the product photography here looks dramatically different. Auto might be accurate but it might not, and notice here that we do have different choices that we can decide what to keep in the shot, but getting a proper white balance is really important. In this case, my suggestion is that we manually white balance and there are many ways to do this, but one method is to use a white calibration card. Let me put that in the shot here. I'll just set up an object here, in this case a light stand, to help hold this and either I could bring this in or and assistant could, but this is a white reference card, and it's not actually white. It's a light gray. It's a neutral gray and it helps us set accurate white balance. The key is to get that in the shot as close as possible to your subject and try to keep it perpendicular to the camera. If it's angled too much, it's going to catch a lot of that overhead light and it's not really accurate. I'll just go ahead and slip this into place and just actually use my air blower there to help sort of mount it. Now it fills the frame. On the camera, you'll go to one of your custom white balance settings. Now, you can either do this here and manually sort of choose a white balance, and that's fine and this allows you to go in and start to make changes. If I press the info button here for example, I could just guess and try out different white balances. Notice how we can warm or cool the shot down and this is in degrees Kelvin, which is a common way of measuring light. That looks pretty good, but I don't know if it's accurate, so in this case what I'm going to do is take advantage of one of the presets. I can go on over here and assign a white balance. Your camera likely has more than one bank. This means you could set the white balance for indoors and outdoors if you were doing an event, like a wedding, and quickly switch between the modes without having to stop and re-white balance. Now, what I could do is press this button and then I'll press the info button and it will adjust to the scene. It says point the camera at a sheet of paper. I did. I'll press the shutter button here (click) and say yes, go ahead and capture that. Again, you just go into the preset, press the info button, and then press the shutter button and it will attempt to capture. I'm going to turn the flash off here because that does influence things and lets do this without the flash now. There we go. Custom white balance. I'll press the info button and capture. That looks good so I'll say yes. Now, we can remove this object and look at the scene. Wow, what a difference. Look at how the color is just totally accurate. Our silvers are silver. Our whites are white, and it looks so much better. By taking the time to configure the white balance, you solved so many problems. Now if you're shooting raw, this is not as big of a deal 'cause it is easy to fix in post, but why get it wrong. By getting an accurate white balance while you shoot, you could feel confident that you're getting the right results. Now if you don't have the time or the skill to custom set the white balance, you might find auto white balance or a preset useful, but nothing beats the accuracy of taking the time to set your own white balance under your lighting conditions because as you can see, it makes a world a difference.

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