Special Message:
Which is more important, getting a new PlayStation or your health and wellbeing?
Buy these as cards
Get these as prints for your walls
White Balance and Automatic White Balance
| Click on the picture, right, and
see more. This topic is about getting good colour, and making the it all look more natural. Having the wrong White Balance can make it all look 'cold' or 'too warm'. |
 |
| Basically, White Balance is the settings
in the camera that assume what 'white' should look like under certain
lighting conditions. This also renders other colours, too. It's advised that, at first, use AWB (Automatic White Balance) until you're more comfortable with using A, S, and M as discussed on earlier pages. Then later, start using the White Balance setting where you can. It can make a big difference in quality of colour in your pictures. I bet you'll forget to change from Fluorescent (indoor lighting) to Sunny occasionally, and this is when you can see a big difference in colour temperature (see below). |
||||||||||||
| That's right, you did read 'colour temperature'. Colour can be measured in terms of temperature, because temperature is a measure of movement. That is, in a glass of water, the water particles are vibrating, just like the plastic in the chair you're sitting on. The more movement there is, the higher the temperature; the less movement, the lower the temperature. There's more that can be explained on this, but I'll leave that to the good people of Wikipedia: colour temperature. | ||||||||||||
Essentially, to cut a long story short,
as shown in the picture above, there are a few White Balance settings, and
most cameras are pretty similar, and there's some variety. But essentially
they usually are:
|
||||||||||||
| Try to use these, as it does make a big difference in picture colour quality. | ||||||||||||
| !!! Take a teddy bear outside (or
something else) and take several photographs of it scientifically in the
same way, whilst only changing the White Balance settings, and see the
difference. Below, I've done just that. All of these were taken with a studio flash, of which it's settings were not changed. The picture with the 'correct White Balance' was taken as a reference photo to be compared to the others. Notice carefully and see if the 'white' is white in each.
|
|
Correct WB
|
Daylight
|
Shade
|
|
Cloudy
|
Tungsten
|
Fluorescent
|
|
Flash |
|
See here for an interesting use of White Balance |
We proudly support:
