Here’s a great tutorial that appeared this week on Macworld.com about how-to use your camera’s white balance controls.
Below is an example of a poorly white balanced image.
There’s a lot of color correction that can be done inside of your image editing software, such as iPhoto or Photoshop, but the best way to fix color issues is to have your camera setup properly before you shoot.
Enjoy!
Author Credit: Ben Long
The human eye has a lot of amazing capabilities. It can see in 3D, it has continuous auto-focus, and it is so light-sensitive that it can detect a single photon of light. Amongst these and other astounding feats is the ability to perceive color correctly under any lighting conditions. If this seems like a ho-hum achievement, consider that we have yet to develop an imaging technology that can do this. Film can’t, and neither can digital sensors.
What is white balance?
The problem is that different types of light shine with different colors. Sunlight, for example, shines a very blue light (no, our sun does not cast yellow light; take a look at your shadow next time you’re outside and you’ll find that it’s slightly blue), and incandescent light bulbs shine very red. While your eye can adjust automatically to these different light sources, so that color appears correct under each of them, your digital camera must be calibrated to a light source to properly represent color. This calibration process is called white balancing.
If you think back to elementary school, there was probably a day that you learned about rainbows and prisms, and how both of these split light into its component colors of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. In other words: white light contains every other color. The idea with white balancing is that if you can get your camera to properly represent white, then all other colors will be correct.
Choose a white balance preset
By default, your camera is configured to use its auto white balance mode. When in this mode, the camera analyzes the scene and tries to determine the best white balance—the one that will yield the most accurate colors. These days, the auto white balance mechanisms on most cameras are very good, and will almost always yield accurate results when shooting in bright daylight, and several other types of light. However, even the best auto white balance system can begin to fail when shooting in shade.
Read the rest of the article HERE.
Speak Your Mind!