White Balance in SECONDS for video and photography proper color explained

let's say you're in a forest and the lighting is all green what are you going to do so there's basically three things your camera needs to get right exposure is it too light or dark is it in focus and what's the color if your color is not right then it might not look too good so right now these lights are kind of dayligh is they're LEDs they're around 5500 and I have the camera set at on in tungsten i f 3200 so it looks really blue if I use tungsten lighting do I look more normal now so this is tungsten ligh this is balanced for 3200 and now it looks normal this is indoor lighting this is generally what indoor lighting is it's it's kind of orangey now here's where it gets kind of tricky one method of white balance that some people have suggested is where you have this Frosty thing you put over your lens and then that kind of gives you a reading of the ambient light all around you there's also a prism type thing where it's got little facets that kind of gets the light from all around I'll tell you why this doesn't work this is assuming that the light is the same everywhere but it's usually never is like right now I've got a 3200 light here let's say you have a window with sunlight coming in which is bluish light that's 5600 this is a daylight bulb and that's bluish light the orange light is not going into the lens the blue light is going into the lens so if you put this over the lens and you take a white balance reading this is what you get it's too orange why because the camera this thing was picking up the blue light blue light's going into this reflector that light's not hitting this so that's why these things don't work you don't want to take an ambient reading of whatever's in the air because you've got orange light going in this direction and blue light going in this direction that happens a lot in real life you've got different colors of light coming from all different directions so what you need to do for white balance is you need to take a white balance reading right where the face is be this one where is it this one here that's where you want to take the white balance reading more and more light sources are LEDs nowadays and they're getting better at the actual light values of white balance so if you have a trusted light source that you use a lot for your lighting like apature or godocs or something like that and it's set for daylight you can often just set your camera to Daylight and it's probably going to be pretty good and if you're outside in bright sunlight you can set it on sunlight and it's pretty good the tricky part is when you have light that's coming from different directions or you're in shade or you're indoors or you have you know a wall bouncing light or you're you're in a forest or you're especially indoors indoors the lighting is all over the place you got a little warm spot here a cool spot there you've got different light directions coming from all sides so that's where you should measure the white balance and do it manually and that's where you can now I know people say shoot in raw fix it later look I don't do that I want to get it right in the camera right away and be done and then I'm done with my I can get on with my life I don't fix things in post that is so not me to have to spend all the rest of my life just trying to fix things that I did when I shot it get it right in the first place I shoot jpegs I don't shoot raw and I'm telling you how you can I mean isn't it great to just shoot something and it's done and you're just feel good like it's done like took two seconds all right you've got these things here you know these collapsible things uh they come in different sizes this is not neutral gray it's pretty close but it's not real neutral gray uh it can actually change color based on temperature and lighting and conditions or the the printing inks that they use this is not Pure White this is actually kind of uh this is a more of a warmer light white so don't ever use this this is actually made for exposure not for white balance this is for setting your exposure properly so you're not too light or too dark I'll get that in the next video you can use this and I've used this before and in a pinch if you have nothing nothing else this will work just realize it's not going to be perfect this is not uh uh neutral gray um you can use it okay but uh there are better things and that's what I'm talking about here most of these are made for postwork in other words when you doing a video or taking a picture you have the person hold this in front of their face uh before you do your photo shoot or your video and then later on you go into your editing software and you use your calibration stuff for getting the colors and the exposure right BAS on this thing I use these things for uh getting it right before I do my photo shoot and I actually use these as my white balance and everything you know and it's good to always have this as a backup in case something does screw up you can fix it in post if you do have the a shot of this but what I do is I zoom in on just the gray part here and I only do like the these couple here that's all I do is I zoom in on that and I take my white balance on just the Grays and that works pretty pretty good this is a pretty good company DGK col tools.com uh they have different kinds here don't get don't ever get the cheaper ones the cheaper ones are shiny see how this is shiny you don't want shiny because then you're going to get the readings just not be always get the more expensive ones which are flat so no matter what angle you put this in is you're not going to get any shine or color casting on this so this this is the way to go um they also have this one which looks really kind of weird at first to you like that's not really gray that looks kind of greenish like why is this color so weird this is actually an underwater white balance color chart if you're a diver and you go underwater and stuff it's the same company now we get on to these ones these are the ones you're starting to see a lot of on the internet nowadays these are not cheap these are little pocket things that you put in your pocket and then you open it up and it has it has color charts it has uh Gray black and white and it has a white balance card and a focus chart this is the one you want to focus on right here now this is not Pure White the way the camera Works in uh to get white balance normally if you put it in Auto it looks for something that's white the whitest thing it can find in the picture and it bases its its assumption uh of color correction on that a lot of times Pure White is an Overexposed part of the sky or something a white wall where there's just too much light and just Overexposed and that throws everything off because let's say uh for example the brightest part is a window okay you've got something outside sunlight and it's all bluish color but you're indoors and you're kind of an orangey light so the camera is going to think that everything is bluish but it's not because the brightest part is actually outside the window so you can't go on auto I would never trust Auto white balance on a camera I mean if if you can help it because it's just going to the white the lightest whitest part of the picture is usually not the correct color anyway and then of course clipping once something is clipped then you're not going to be able to get a good reading and so that's why when uh when you have a white thing here a white balance this isn't Pure White this is actually a little bit darker than pure white this is kind of like a very light gray and this is what you do your white balance off now how Dependable are these well they're pretty good I mean this one here is actually one you don't want this is a data color spider Checker see how this is shiny I don't know why they made that shiny why the hell is that shiny you're going to get an off reading with that whereas this one is matte this is a color Checker passport by calite look at that no matter which angle you put it in there's no shine why they made shiny on here is beyond me I know your blacks get blacker when you have shiny but then that you get the midtones and the highlights get thrown off from the lights that are hitting it and reflecting in the highlights so I don't really like this one I like this one here this is a color cheer passport by calbrite thing I don't like about it is really hard to open and close it's like why do they make this so hard to open I feel like I'm going to break it you know and then you get you stick your finger on there and you get fingerprints on the on the things which you're not supposed to touch which screws up the the acids in your finger screw up the the color things but this is like trying to open this is like why don't they just make it normal like a just flap it open but anyway this is pretty good so what you do is you have the person hold this in front of their face you zoom in really close on this and you get your white balance I'll show you how easy it is to do a white balance rating in a second here um there's even little things like this that are kind of cute um always go for the flat color thing anything that's a flat matte color this is by Lumina that's kind of cute and then there's this thing by spider this is a spider Cube this is something you can there's videos on how to do this you hold this uh in the shot and there's a a white balance the now notice there's different sides of the gray you've got a a shadow side and a highlight side there might be blue light coming from this side and orange light coming from this side or pink or green or yellow so that this kind of takes the average of that uh and then you have a hole there which is the blackest black you can get and then You' got the shiny thing here which gets the Highlight with the brightest highlight you can get so this is used mainly for postwork most of this stuff is for doing postwork I like to get it right before I do it the easiest way to do that is piece of white paper now I know some people go oh it's going to clip and stuff no it won't this is not Pure White this is actually this is if this was Pure White it would be glowing this would be an LED panel that's glowing this is not Pure White some people think that they add dyes to this to make it more more whitish white uh I actually found this to be pretty darn close and I know there's different paper companies at different colors of of of of of paper but I find this is actually this is not pure white and this is not bluish this is actually pretty darn close you can test it yourself like I did look at this after white balancing the camera with white paper the vector scope is a perfect pin dot look at that and on the RGB parade red green and blue are perfect it's so easy to just get a white piece of paper and hold it in front of you take a white balance reading and and not in in front of the camera always have it in front of the person so that that's the way I do it paper can be folded up really easy and put in your pocket and that's gets to my next thing the best thing is not a a flat piece of white paper it's a crumpled piece of white paper now why is this better I'll tell you why because you have all these different angles here of paper reflecting all kinds of different you know whatever the ambient colors are right here are reflected so you're not getting see if you're holding a piece of Pap that's something that's flat and the lights coming from One Direction and you're not holding it just the right angle you might be getting an off reading this thing is getting readings from a 100 different angles so you're getting a good average of what's going on in front of the person's face when you zoom in on white paper this this cost a penny this is so cheap you know I mean so crinkle up your paper so you can get all the different angles hitting it right in front of the person's face and you get a good average of it and that's another issue is uh what if you have green light coming from this side and orangey light coming from this side and blue light coming from this side you know you all you can really do is take the average of that you can't really unless you there's a light a main one that you want to choose as you're let's say 3/4 of the light hitting the person is a bluish light then you should favor the bluish light and have the the the angle of the the thing that you're using or reading aiming at the bluish light and not the greenish light so this thing gets a good average of it so crumpled white paper I think is the best let me show you how easy it is to get a white balance reading if you have a Canon camera especially a consumer camera I'm sorry you've got the worst of the worst that they make you take a white a picture you have to take a picture of something that's pure white you have to fill the screen with it then you have to go into the menu and you got to go to three different settings then you have to do take a white balance reading of the picture that you just took it takes like a minute to do a stupid white balance and by then your your shots gone uh these other cameras I mean Cinema cameras don't have that they just have a white balance button you push and then you get an instant reading but other companies like uh Sony and Panasonic it's so easy check this out okay here we have a Panasonic camera all Panasonic cameras have this you see the dial on the back here see where it says white balance it's just you just push on that you get your preset or in this case I'm going to go to a choose your own custom white balance you push up see the square and then you just take a white balance reading and you're done that's how easy that is with a Panasonic camera Sony's got something very similar you just go to your function button and then you go to your presets or you do a custom one in which case you just push the button to the right you push set then you get it you put the square you see the little square you don't have to fill the whole screen you just get your white part in that square and you push that and you're done so these things here are so easy look at here's another Panasonic camera got the white balance button right there on the side this is so easy when you have these these kind of cameras it takes literally seconds to do a white balance and and and you should always do that because it's so much easier to get it right when you when you're shooting the thing rather than having to fix it later on and raw is not the answer for everything you can't fix everything in raw it's like that's a big myth get it right start shooting with jpeg so you can learn the hard way how to do it right and then also you're saving yourself the time because you got it done that's my white bounds thing uh I just use a crumbled piece of white paper that's just what I do uh do whatever you want and I'm going to get into exposure next how to get the nail the proper exposure in a camera in the next video that's equally important how do you get it to not be too dark or too light all right hope you learned something I'll see you in the next video oh

Channel: MarkusPix

Views: 49,089

Keywords: white balance, white balance tutorial, what is white balance, white balance explained, how to white balance, how to set white balance, custom white balance, setting white balance, white balance for beginners, white balance for video, color temperature, camera white balance, white balance settings, how to set white balance for video, setting custom white balance, white balance video, colour grading, white balance card, how to custom white balance, white balance in photography

Id: gl4d_SHI8AM

Length: 14min 32sec (872 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 10 2024