I was so wrong about White Balance.
I thought I could dial in the Kelvin light temperature setting on my camera, and *bam* I’d have perfect colors. It’s setting to an exact value, so it’s the most accurate way to set colors. Right?
Wrong; and because of that I caused myself years of color correction headaches!
With this video I hope I can help save you from those same headaches.
In this studio I shoot under controlled lighting, but even if you’re NOT in a studio, properly white balancing your camera will help you get better color consistently from shot to shot.
For food videos in this studio I shoot with 4 cameras simultaneously to catch the action from different angles. I set my cameras to the same Kelvin temperature on their white balance, but I still struggled with color matching between cameras during editing.
I bought a color chart, and if you’ve bought one of these, you know they’re not cheap!… and did my calibrations on it. Still had problems.
And the funny thing is that my oldest, cheapest camera that I use for overhead shots would consistently give me the best colors!
For example, here is a shot of some lettuce for a Caesar salad video I did recently. The overhead shot has the right colors, but the side shot from a technically much better camera has a weird magenta color cast.
Worse, the color even changes slightly from shot to shot, so I would go in and have to tweak the colors on each scene one by one.
I thought maybe it was reflections, or maybe the way the light was hitting the subject as things moved.
Well, it turns out that it was the most basic thing: my white balance, and just setting the Kelvin temperature isn’t good enough. Here’s why:
I think anyone who has done photo or video retouching knows about the color temperature slider. When you adjust the slider, it moves the image between blues and oranges. This is what I was locking in when I set the Kelvin color temperature on the cameras.
But that’s only HALF of the equation.
Just below the temperature slider is the Tint slider. This one moves the image between green and magenta.
So by setting the white balance in Kelvin temperature, I’m only locking the blues and oranges, but the camera is still auto adjusting the tint’s green and magenta values!
That’s why the green lettuce would be off from camera to camera, and even shot to shot. It’s not just greens. Skin tones, yellows, everything else could vary from shot to shot. That’s because the Tint value was changing depending on what else was in the scene.
And why was the overhead camera consistently better?
Well, when I first set up this studio over a year ago, I did a manual white balance by taking a picture of a white piece of paper because I didn’t yet know what Kelvin temperature to use; and I just forgot about it after that.
Setting white balance by taking a picture of a card just seems like an old method and more error-prone; definitely less “scientific” than setting a precise Kelvin color temperature.
But by setting the white balance off a card, you’re actually fixing BOTH the temperature and tint of your lighting.
This is what you want for proper color.
Now, this is probably old news to some people, but I think there are still a few too many videos and web pages that tell people to just set the Kelvin color temperature and you’ll get great color.
Kelvin color temperature is only half of the white balance setting and you’re leaving the other half to chance.
Even if you shoot in non-studio, non-controlled locations where the lights might change from shot to shot, it is definitely worth taking a bit of time to manually white balance your camera. You’ll get much better color consistency throughout the video, from shot to shot, and from location to location.
Now, if you’re using multiple cameras like I do here, especially different models of cameras, you will still get some variation from camera to camera, there are just differences from model to model. But at least you shouldn’t have weird color swings from only setting Kelvin temperature.
Since buying a proper grey card and manually setting the white balance on all my cameras, I get MUCH better and CONSISTENT colors.
This simple, cheap card is probably the best investment I’ve made in years.
Exactly how you set the white balance using a grey card will vary from camera to camera, so please check the manual for your camera.
Affiliate links:
・Gray card https://amzn.to/3Z8MFL6
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