Understanding White Balance | Mark Wallace

[Music] [Applause] hi everybody welcome to another episode of exploring photography right here on adoramatv i'm mark wallace and in this episode we're going to be talking about white balance what the heck is white balance what the heck are we balancing well to help me out with this i've invited theresa she's going to be here today we are going to first i'm going to discuss some technical things and teresa teresa's going to come out we're going to take some pictures we're going to show how the white balance will change the colors and the skin tones and all of that stuff and why it's so important so teresa take a break i'm going to do the technical stuff and then she's going to come back first we need to understand what does white balance do well when you think about white balance i think the better thing to think about is maybe color balance because that's really what we're doing is we're trying to adjust the colors so let's start with this so this is a white card and this is a color checker white card and so it's a white balance card so this will look white to my eyes if i'm outside in a bright day if it's cloudy if i look at this it's going to look white to me if i'm inside my house with my incandescent lights and i look at it it's going to look white it doesn't really matter what light is on when i look at it this is going to look white but that is not true for a digital camera digital cameras they see things through rgb red green and blue that mixture of colors creates white and so if the camera misinterprets those colors what will happen is this will be orange or it'll be blue or it'll have a tint to it maybe green or magenta so how do we get white to look white and why is that important well because if we get this to be correct then all of the other colors in our scene will also be correct and so to understand that i'm going to hand this over here to teresa to understand that really we have to understand something called color temperature and so there was this guy he was a scientist years ago many years ago his name was mr kelvin dr kelvin and kelvin created his own scale of temperature sort of like celsius or fahrenheit and what he did was he was measuring how colors and how light changed as things increased in temperature so over here on this white board here i have created a scale so these are kelvin temperatures 1900 kelvin that's what the k stands for five 3200 eight thousand kelvin so nineteen hundred kelvin would be something that's sort of cool like a candle or a match so that is really cool so it's not really hot 3200 kelvin would be something a little bit warmer like an incandescent light those old school light bulbs we used to screw in and they would have a filament inside 3200 kelvin 5500 kelvin is maybe an outside day clear blue sky and then 8 000 kelvin would be a normal really nice day with lots of clouds in the sky so as things increase in temperature something happens so if i get my little fancy markers over here over here at 1900 degrees kelvin we have something like a candle and so there's a lot of amber or orange in this right down here where it's really cool and as things increase in temperature we have less and less amber in the scene so think about those old uh incandescent lights they're sort of orangey because there's lots of orange lots of ambers in there on the other side of things as things increase in temperature what happens is you get more and more blue so we get more and more blue in our scene so a blue sky is blue because it's warmer we have more blue there so what we're trying to do with white balance is we're trying to make sure we have an equal amount of blue and amber so that our white and our colors aren't too orange or too blue so if i were to take this and draw a line down the center and we want to balance these out you're thinking mark this is backwards because in lightroom when i slide the white balance slider to the left to cool things down it it makes it blue so isn't it blue when it's cool and isn't it orange when it's warm because that's sort of how we talk about that a cool image has blue and a warm image has orange well that is color theory and so that's a psychological effect of colors but it's not color temperature it's the opposite in fact let me show you why that's the case and why that slider behaves that way so if we're down here and we have something that is cool like an incandescent light or a candlestick what we need to do to balance out the blue and the amber is we need to add in some blue we need to add blue so that there's an equal amount of amber and blue and it's 50 50. so it's neutral that's why when you slide that slider to the left it's adding blue and that's what we call cooling it down but we're adding blue to do that the other side of that is when we're warming something up we need to balance out all that blue so we're actually adding some amber some reds so there's an equal amount of blue and red so that's why that slider seems backwards it's not what it's doing is it's balancing those colors and so we get white instead of something that's too amber or something that's too blue so that is how that works okay so now what we want to do is we're going to take this and figure out how do we apply that to our camera to get proper colors and what are the different modes on our camera your camera has different modes for white balance there's auto white balance preset white balance custom white balance to help you understand what these different things do i want to create a video so you can see with your eyes what's happening so teresa is going to come out and behind us we have just a white wall so it should be white all the time no matter what the color temperature is and i have some fancy lights here this is a nan light compact 200b and the thing with this light is i can change the color temperature so i can make it 3200 kelvin all the way up to 5600 kelvin and so what i want to do is i'm going to put this light on teresa and show you what happens in different white balance modes so the first thing i'm going to do is we're going to show you auto white balance and so you can see this clearly we have to turn off the light that's illuminating me we're only going to see the light on teresa my video camera is set to auto white balance and so our light is set at 5600 kelvin but the wall behind theresa looks white watch what happens when i take my color temperature and i go all the way down to 3200 notice she looks totally orange the wall looks orange because our color temperature has changed but the video camera sees that there's a problem with that white wall behind her and so slowly but surely the camera is going to make adjustments so that the white returns to white that is auto white balance it's auto correcting itself and so you don't really have to think about things too much now my video camera is set to a specific color temperature 3200 kelvin to match the light that's illuminating teresa now watch what happens when i adjust the color temperature of the light everything becomes blue because this light is much hotter much warmer but the camera doesn't adjust the camera is expecting things to be 3200 kelvin so no matter how long we wait the camera is not going to make any adjustments so if i change this and go all the way back down to 3200 notice that the colors now look natural well how do we tell our camera what the correct white balance is we have these different modes first of all let's talk about auto white balance where we saw that the video camera was able to figure out that there was too much blue or amber and adjust and get things pretty close to correct well what the video camera was doing and what your still camera will do in auto white balance is it looks for neutral colors specifically this white wall that's behind teresa or my gray shirt or a black wall those monochromatic colors have an equal amount of red and blue and so the camera will look at that and go you know what there shouldn't be a color cast it shouldn't be too blue if it is add some amber to bring it back to white if it's too amber add some blue to bring that back that's how the camera is figuring things out in auto white balance it doesn't matter if you're shooting with a still camera or a video camera both of them do it the same way but what happens if you aren't in a place that has a big white wall or a nice gray shirt or a neutral color well there are two things that you can do if you know what the color temperature is if you're using a flash or hot lights that we're using right now constant lights if you're using an led light something that will show you what the color temperature is you can just go into your camera and say this is a very specific color temperature 3200 5600 whatever so you can set that color temperature specifically or if you know what environment you're in there are different modes for that so there are incandescent lights there's that little light bulb there's outside there are fluorescent settings so if you know you're in a building with fluorescent light you can put your camera on fluorescent and it should be just fine so there's all those modes that are sort of preset but to get perfect white balance and color that's the best what you need to do is you need to have a calibrated target so we have one right here this is a color checker white balance this is a white card and so it is a uh calibrated card so there are is no color bias at all and so if our camera sees this we can set a custom white balance to say this is what white should be and then our camera can look at that and then make the adjustment so white is perfectly white now the fun of this is if you're shooting in jpeg mode you need to make sure you set that in the camera so you would use a white balance a custom white balance you set a custom white balance in the camera many different ways depending on the brand but let me give you a summary of how it works with most brands you need to look in your user manual to see specifically how it works for your camera because they all do it a little bit differently but basically you take a photo of the white card or the gray card whatever is calibrated a neutral color and then you tell your camera that is my custom white balance so that's the first way you can do if you're shooting jpeg you need to do that and save that in your camera because it's difficult to adjust it later however if you're shooting in raw mode you can always change your white balance in post-production in capture one or in lightroom or whatever photo editing software you're using and it is exactly the same as changing your custom white balance in the camera and so that is my preferred way to do it because if i get it just a little bit wrong i can always sweeten the deal so i'm going to show you both ways of doing this first i'm going to take a photo with my camera set my camera into custom white balance mode and say this is the custom white balance and then we're going to do it in post-production post-production is much faster so here's what we're going to do so teresa is over here my camera right now is set to white balance of i think we're set to incandescent lights the little light bulb so it's wrong it's absolutely wrong so if i just take a photo so i'm going to take a photo of teresa here with my white balance that's already set in my camera if we look at that it's blue it looks pretty nasty and so i need to fix this color so what i can do is teresa i'm going to have you hold this white card and she's going to hold it right on her nose so we want it to be as close as possible to the thing that we're balancing and so i will take a photo of that perfect now what i'm going to do is i'm going to tell my camera that's my custom white balance so what i'll do is i'm going to go into my menu i'm going to go to custom white balance and then i'm going to say set it's going to ask me if i want to use this white balance for this custom white balance i'll say ok so now i have set that as my custom white balance but that is not the end of the story the next thing i need to do is i need to go into my camera setting and i need to go over to white balance and say that's a custom white balance and now i have set that correctly and once it's set correctly now i can take a photo of teresa click and look the color is correct so it's correct all day long it's all set okay let's talk about the second way to set a custom white balance if you want to do it in post-production it's the same thing so what we're going to do is i'm going to intentionally go in here i'm going to set my white balance incorrectly so i'm going to set it to fluorescent okay so it's all wrong so hold i'm going to first take a photo so you can see that this is wrong so uh without the card first and then hold up like two fingers so we know this is real and you can see the colors are not correct so now hold up that card i will take a photo and now all i have to do is go into my editing software so i can go into lightroom over here bring this up go to the develop module and you can see there's this little color picker here if i grab that and say this right here click that is the correct color boom you have set the custom white balance and you can see here it says custom that's all there is to it if we want to change that a little bit we can use these sliders but doing it in post allows you to make sure that everything is exactly the way that you want it to be and think also of custom white balance instead of white has to be exactly white that's the starting point once you have your white balance set then you can sweeten it maybe you can make it a little bit more red or amber so it feels a little bit more like maybe the new mexico desert or maybe you cool it down a little bit so it feels like oh it's cold in here you can sweeten your flavors of your color by changing that white balance so a custom white balance or a custom preset white balance or any of those icons that's just a starting point to say this is what it should be but usually it's so white and so pristine that it has no life we need to sweeten things up a little warmer a little cooler to make things look great well that's white balance and i like to think of it more of color balance instead of white balance because it's really balancing all those different rgb color combinations so that white or gray or black those neutral colors remain neutral without a color cast remember you can do that in several ways you can use the built-in presets those little icons the light bulb the fluorescent the cloudy sky whatever your camera has or you can set a specific color temperature if you happen to know what that color temperature is or the best way in my opinion is setting a custom white balance with a calibrated target you can do that either in the camera or you can do that in post-production or you can do both depends on your workflow well theresa thanks so much for being in yet another adoramatv video if you want to see more of teresa's work i've included a link in the description of this video to her instagram so you can see all of her groovy photos she's a fantastic model also check out the links in the description in the description of this video for more videos on color uh balance and color of theory and post processing and all that kind of stuff because there's a lot more on adoramatv and as always don't forget to subscribe and turn on the bell because you don't want to miss anything that's coming out on adoramatv we're updating every single day you don't want to miss out on that well thanks so much for watching and i will see you again next time thank you

Channel: Adorama

Views: 97,257

Keywords: adorama, adoramatv, adorama tv, white balance, understanding white balance, how to white balance, white balance tutorial, white balance in photography, setting white balance, white balance explained, what is white balance, white balance for beginners, custom white balance, camera white balance, understanding white balance for beginners, color balance, white balance settings, white balance card, how to adjust white balance, white balance photography, mark wallace, photography

Id: bjA0Zqs5KRY

Length: 16min 38sec (998 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 06 2022