tips on white balance on canon 7d

N

nimihendrix

just got my camera 2 days ago, and i've been reading a lot on improving dynamic range etc, getting a flat look so you can work with it a lot in post

this emphasized the picture style option


but what should i go for when im setting the white balance?


help, any tips
 
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Get an expodisc and set correct wb. Unless your shooting stills raw then you can do in post but it's always better to get as close as you can.

Owen
 
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It's instead of using a grey card. It's acts as a
Meter and attaches to front of lens. There is a few videos on YouTube that will show you how to use it. Just google it.

Owen
 
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setup your lighting as you want it in the video, pop a pic of something white in the set, have the white fill the image...put cam on custom white balance select the pic of the white item to adjust setting...voila !

or spend $100 for expodisc and go
 
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IndieBudget said:
setup your lighting as you want it in the video, pop a pic of something white in the set, have the white fill the image...put cam on custom white balance select the pic of the white item to adjust setting...voila !

or spend $100 for expodisc and go
Click to expand...

That's what we always do, and then If I am using some kind of colored light I want to put a certain look in the shot I turn that light off, white balance with the base lighting, then turn it back on.
 
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I'm not a huge fan of the 7D's auto white balance. It looks better in my experience to set it according to lumens. 3200k for indoorrs, 5600-6000 usually for outdoors depending on sunlight. It lets you pic anything between 2400 and 9i think) 7000 or close to it. Just scroll through until you see what looks good.
 
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I've had better results with the custom setting than the temp settings. Unless you have a perfect light source (you don't) the temp settings will only get you close to a true white.
 
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The exposedisk will do well, but will falter if you're doing specialized lighting that has multiple colors in it that you want to have show through... it effectively averages your whole scene and white balances to that rather than just to the key light or a white reference being affected by a single light source (which is what should be happening).

If you must use custom white balance (which I advise against - I've gotten much stronger results using the indoor and outdoor presets and adjusting my lighting to match those through filtration) Get a piece of white reference (or a gray card), point it toward a light source that you intend to be white and zoom into it and set your white balance to that.
 
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The trick with the expodisc (or a coffee filter or similar cheap alternative) is to put the camera in the position of your subject and point it directly at your key light when you take the custom shot. That way you don't average all the light & colors in your scene, you'll get great skintones and background lights will have the color you intended.

Gonzo_Entertainment said:
I've been watching the Shane Hurlbutt web series on B&H and he uses temp, but he scrolls through the temp until it "looks right".
Click to expand...

Well, I'm interested in more than 'looks right' - I want my skintones to be accurate and consistent across different lighting situations. Try this: take a full-frame photo of a white or neutral grey card under any single light source with an appropriate color temp dialed in. Then do the same with a custom white balance. Now compare the RGB histograms of the two - the custom will give you identical matched color histograms (meaning true white), the temp never will. Now if you always use the exact same light source I suppose that's not a big deal; you can correct it in post and one correction will work for everything. But if you don't always use the exact same lights then your white balance error will be different for every setup and will take a lot more time in post just to make things consistent. That may not matter to Shane Hurlbut because I would imagine he's got other people who's job it is to deal with fixing things in color correction; I generally don't so I'd rather get things right in camera so that my grading time is spent on look and feel rather than correction.
 
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