This exercise looked at: white balance, colour temperature and how to deal with colour cast and associated challenges.
The exercise helped me to increase my knowledge and understanding of my camera’s white balance settings, ultimately, helping me to achieve better results.
Modern digital cameras offer an extensive range of tools designed to reproduce and record colours correctly. My camera has the following white and colour balance setting: Auto white balance, Daylight, Shade, Cloudy, Tungsten Light, White Fluorescent Light, Flash and Custom. There are separate facilities for setting a custom colour temperature. There are also: colour temperature compensation, white balance correction settings (±9 stops) and white balance bracketing (±3 stops). I was able to fully explore the capabilities of this range of camera facilities through this exercise.
For this exercise groups of mages were shot using different white balance options available on my camera in the following order:
1) Auto white balance
2) Daylight
3) Shade
4) Cloudy
5) Tungsten Light
6) White Fluorescent Light
7) Flash
8) Custom
9) Custom colour temperature
Summary and lessons:
· Where a human eye is capable of seeing and interpreting different colour sources, digital cameras might have limitations and so might need to be ‘helped’ to read the colours correctly. This is why the white balance settings are important.
· Different white balance options and settings demonstrate how a digital camera might interpret various light sources and what adjustments are needed.
· RAW file format is an important tool as it allows setting white balance after the picture was taken. It offers an advantage, allows to adjust colour temperature and deal with colour cast at early stages. I will continue using this file format as my main shooting setting.
· Using a neutral reference point (usually a neutral, mid range colour that a camera is capable of interpreting correctly) is often recommended, particularly in challenging lighting situation or where representing colours correctly is crucial for the integrity of the image. It is possible to carry an 18% Gray card or even a set of white and grey cards to be used as reference points.
· Challenging colour conditions that have been explored through this exercise include:
o Scene or subjects with one predominant colour
o Mixed lighting
o Brightly-lit scenes with high contrast
o Scene that include CFL lighting sources
o Night, early morning and dusk conditions
o A combination of any of the above conditions.
For example, a digital camera might interpret subjects with one predominant colour as manifesting some colour cast and as a result might attempt to compensate for the dominating colour. Checking and making adjustments to the image in RAW format might solve this issue.
· It appears from my camera manual’s that auto white balance function calculates an average colour temperature for the whole scene. In challenging lighting conditions, for example with mixed lighting sources, this might represent a problem. The groups of images shown above demonstrate this. Possible solutions: when mixed lighting sources are used, it might be possible to try different white balance presents. It is also often necessary to make some colour temperature adjustments in Photoshop or Lightroom to compensate for the different colour temperatures of the light sources. It is clear from this exercise that auto white balance setting might generate an image with exaggerated, blown out or unnaturally looking lighting. The photographer needs to decide whether it represents a problem for the particular image and make a choice of whether the adjustments are necessary.
