Using Degrees to Adjust Camera White Balance

Video Transcript

Hi, Rob Mitchell here on behalf of Expert Village. We're going to continue on talking about color temperature of light, and balancing your camera so that you will get a correctly exposed photograph. I mentioned before that you can use Photoshop, obviously, to clean up errors that you've made, and to alter your pictures. But, it's always best to start off with a perfect picture the first time. If you're already starting off with a damaged picture, that it doesn't have the right color balance that you wanted, every time you play with it, every time you fiddle with that picture digitally, in your computer, it is degrading the image. So it's much better to start off with a... the perfect picture the first time and then start adjusting for any changes you might want to make in color, or tone -- sepia tone, warm tones, cold tones. So, we're going to take a look at that as well. OK, in this case, we're using the Canon D20. It's a little bit higher end than a lot of your cameras. It doesn't have the little light bulb, the picture of the sun, and the fluorescent light. See, right down here, this is the info on the camera, which tells me what I'm shooting at. It tells me my ISO speed. Can you see right up here? K5500, that's degrees Kelvin. So it tells me that it is balanced for daylight. Now how do we switch? OK, well, on this camera, we're going to go to Menu, we can do a custom light balance, but we're not going to go there, we could slide down here to color temperature. Now, we can change it. Remember, I said we're doing 5500 because we're shooting outdoors. Let's suppose we're shooting under those tungsten lights that we're using in the studio. Remember what I said they were? 3200. Well, the beauty -- woops, wrong way -- beauty of this camera is, it's going to let me dial in exactly the color temperature that I want to shoot at. Here we go, 3200. So, we would get to the session where we're using the model, and we're using the tungsten lights. We're going to shoot it at 5500 and then at 3200, and we'll see exactly how it looks and what the difference is. Now, you can dial in a lot of different color temperatures, because, like everything else in life, it's not so cut and dry that daylight is exactly 5500 degrees. That's under sunlight. If you get a little bit cloudy the color temperature can go up and you can boost the output, you'd be getting maybe a little bit more bluish tint in your picture. So, you might have to play around with this a little bit. But safe to say on the majority of cameras, you don't have to manually set the degrees Kelvin. What you can do is you can go in there and you can set it to the sunlight, set it to clouds if it's a cloudy day, a lot of cameras have that. Use a little fluorescent tube if you have... if you're shooting under fluorescent lights. You have to play around with it a bit.

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