I shot a scene of actors walking down a hallway for example. There are lights going down the hall, but there is one window in the middle of the hall. The white balance was set to white fluorescent, since that's what the lights were, but when the actors walk past the window, along with the camera moving with them, the sunlight peering through, is blue. Of course this is because of the white balance. How in the digital world do you fix this, having a scene with two different types of light? Even if I choose one type of light to light a scene, there are windows in rooms too, and sometimes, for sake of the scene and story, you want them left open. Do you just end up having to pick which light you want shown with the incorrect balance?
cinematography Question about white balancing.
- Thread starter harmonica44
- Start date
I've never heard of the "take a picture of a white card" approach. I bet if you're in auto mode it would set it for that one picture, but not manual. Traditional camcorders have an auto-white button where you point the camera at a white card, hit it and it automatically balances itself.
Pretty much the same thing. It's a bit off-putting when you're used to the AWB button, but some DSLRs (the Sony NEX5 comes to mind) instead of doing a live balance instead take a picture, and analyze that to determine the color temperature. Just remember to turn the flash off I've seen too many people forget to switch the flash off before balancing, and it influences their result.
I use daylight for capturing sunlit as a main lighting source, then gel other lights to match... If my key is a tungsten light, I set it to indoor/tungsten. Those are the only two settings I use on my camera. Everything else is adjusting the lights in the real world to give the effects I'm looking for.
And that's the ideal, total control of the lighting in the scene. I definitely agree. There are, however, situations in which you won't have total control of your color temperature, be it a doc, a quick in and out on-location promo shoot, what have you. I find that having an active knowledge of (and quick access to) a given camera's white-balance controls is rather paramount in importance.
In those cases, I agree... I don't tend to shoot things I don't control as I do mostly narrative work. In other situations, I'd rather use the 2 presets and have lens filters of less than full strength CTO and CTB to gently push away from the other to keep the color in the shot rather than white balancing it out completely.
I don't know if all DSLRs are the same, but on the T2i, you actually do have to take a picture of a white card. It's kind of annoying, definitely not as easy as with a camcorder.
That's what I have tried several times, but it never works, and whenever the white balance is on custom, everything comes out green, even after I take it.
You can't just take a picture and be done with it. There are a couple more steps.
Have you tried reading the user's manual? Have you heard of this thing called google? Perhaps you've heard of this nifty website called youtube.
Dude. C'mon.