A quick lesson in white balance and why not to leave it on auto.
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Transcript
I know these pocket size cameras are very, very popular and that’s great. I like them a lot, they’re pocketable. You can take them anywhere and it’s not a big deal and you take pictures. And usually the pictures turned out very nice.
However, sometimes you’d probably notice that the pictures come out very yellow or very green or the color just isn’t right.
Basically, what’s happening is the camera by default is set to Auto ISO, Auto Flash and Auto White Balance. And the Auto White Balance is what causes the problems. I don’t mind if you use Auto Flash, Auto ISO, anything make it as easy as possible but the Auto White Balance is something that you really want to try and avoid using and that’s because in indoor situations, you’re going to end up with those very yellow cast images.
So, the way to remedy that is change the Auto Mode. Right now, I’m using a Canon so my Auto Mode is here in this case and I need to change that to a slightly more Manual Mode. And don’t worry, Manual doesn’t mean I have to choose the Aperture and the shutter or anything like that. Everything is still automated except for the things like Flash, ISO and White Balance.
It gives me other options but I don’t care about those other options. I want to leave everything automatic. I’ll press Function to escape the function menu. And I want to make sure that my Flash is set to automatic so I’ll press the Flash button until I get to automatic.
You don’t have to worry about the flash anymore. Press ISO and go to Auto ISO, okay. I don’t have to worry about the ISO anymore and the White Balance in order to change this, what I want to do is press the Function button or with your camera anyway that is required to access the White Balance and go down.
Right now, you can see that my White Balance is set to Day Light. What White Balance does is it compensates for the colorcast from the light source. What does that mean? Well, right now, you can see my pictures aren’t the right colors. Everything looks a little bit yellowish. It’s not quite right.
If I go over to cloudy, things kind of warm up a little bit, it added a few red’s in there. If go to tungsten everything is very, very blue. And if I go to fluorescent, now everything looks a lot more natural. My background is actually white. Mr. Potato head looks good. His little friend stuff dog looks just fine and that’s because I’m using fluorescent lighting.
So, this allows the camera to adjust its color to the light source that is being use. From outdoors, go ahead and use Day Light. Cloudy will warm up the image a little bit and Tungsten is great for indoors. This will eliminate any of that yellowish cast that you may have been getting when you’re using Auto White Balance and Fluorescent again if using fluorescent lighting.
So, those are the main options. You don’t have to worry about custom and high fluorescent but these are really the four that you should usually use for your lighting. These are working in just about any situation.
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I've tutored thousands of digital camera users since 1998. I love this subject and want to share the knowledge I've gained over the years with as many as possible. I hope you enjoy my video guides.
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