Hello friends. In my earlier post I discussed about shutter speed, aperture and ISO. Hope you have experimented with the manual setting a lot and have taken a lot of test pictures. Basically those are the most important three things you need to understand to take a good photo. But there is another setting which is also very important to take beautiful pictures. And that is known as 'White Balance'. Unfortunately, most of us amateur photographers tend to ignore this important thing, set it on automatic and start shooting. In this post I am going to explain what is white balance, why it is important, how to choose white balance correctly. So without wasting further time, let us start-
The last setting, Manual, is a bit complicated though. It requires you to take a photo and direct the camera to use that picture as reference picture. Professionals use 18% grey cards for doing this. Lets skip that part for now. I shall write a detailed post regarding this later on.
What is white balance-
In layman's language, we can say that white balance is the in-built color correction feature of our camera. In other words, white balance is nothing more than an adjustment to get the color you want. Still confused?
This example will clear the confusion:- Suppose you are in a room with white walls and there are some bulbs in it. One tungsten bulb, one CFL, and a tube light inside a somewhat grey casing. Now, if you take turns at lighting one bulb at a time,and taking pictures of the walls, you will notice that the white walls do not appear white anymore. The tungsten light makes the walls look like some shade of orange, while the CFL makes the walls look bluish. White balance comes into picture at this moment. It warms or cools the color temperature and renders the wall white in the final image. (Warming color temperature means adding a reddish hue to the picture while cooling color temperature means bluish hue). Consider this example-
The picture on the right is shoot with "Cloud" preset white balance and the picture on the left is taken with "Tungsten" preset white balance. These two shots were taken keeping every other variables like light, background etc constant. What the camera is doing here is taking the picture, warming/cooling down the color temperature as per the preset and producing the final image.
Lets keep one thing in mind that our eyes are much more sophisticated than even the most sophisticated man made camera in the world. So when we look at our surroundings, our mind does the color correction bit and we see things. But cameras are not so intelligent. They need to be told about the while balance to take the perfect image.
Now comes the next question. In every camera there is a auto white balance option which does the white balancing work quite well. Then why should we learn about it? Let the camera do whatever it is doing!!! Well, it is partially correct. The auto WB in most of the modern day cameras are pretty good and they do a decent job. Perhaps 90% people out there will not even notice it. But we are photography enthusiasts, so we need to know. Although the auto WB is pretty good, it won't always give the correct result. Suppose you are shooting a sunrise and want your picture to look reddish to capture the essence but your camera is cooling down the color temperature and your pictures look bland. Then your only option is manually setting it correct.
This example will clear the confusion:- Suppose you are in a room with white walls and there are some bulbs in it. One tungsten bulb, one CFL, and a tube light inside a somewhat grey casing. Now, if you take turns at lighting one bulb at a time,and taking pictures of the walls, you will notice that the white walls do not appear white anymore. The tungsten light makes the walls look like some shade of orange, while the CFL makes the walls look bluish. White balance comes into picture at this moment. It warms or cools the color temperature and renders the wall white in the final image. (Warming color temperature means adding a reddish hue to the picture while cooling color temperature means bluish hue). Consider this example-
Lets keep one thing in mind that our eyes are much more sophisticated than even the most sophisticated man made camera in the world. So when we look at our surroundings, our mind does the color correction bit and we see things. But cameras are not so intelligent. They need to be told about the while balance to take the perfect image.
Now comes the next question. In every camera there is a auto white balance option which does the white balancing work quite well. Then why should we learn about it? Let the camera do whatever it is doing!!! Well, it is partially correct. The auto WB in most of the modern day cameras are pretty good and they do a decent job. Perhaps 90% people out there will not even notice it. But we are photography enthusiasts, so we need to know. Although the auto WB is pretty good, it won't always give the correct result. Suppose you are shooting a sunrise and want your picture to look reddish to capture the essence but your camera is cooling down the color temperature and your pictures look bland. Then your only option is manually setting it correct.
What settings do I have to do-
Before we begin, one important pointer to keep in mind. If we are shooting RAW, then we can easily ignore setting WB and carry on shooting in auto mode. Because we can easily change the WB while editing. But if we are shooting JPEG, it becomes a lot more tricky to correct WB later on. So, if we are shooting JPEG, its of utmost importance that we should set the WB according to the situation.
Setting correct WB is very easy. If you go into the white balance menu in your camera, you will find, there are some presets there. They are more or less the same regardless of the camera brand. The most common preset WB options are-
1. Daylight.
2. Fluorescent.
3. Shade.
4. Tungsten.
5.Cloudy.
6. Flash.
7. Manual.
Without going into jaw dropping terminologies, lets get this part straight-
When you are shooting in daylight, choose daylight, when you are shooting in Fluorescent light, choose fluorescent and so on. Just choose the condition closest to the one you are shooting at present and shoot. Hope this is not very tough.
However, I would suggest to take lots of pictures in different WB settings and see later which one looks better (where you can do so, obviously you can't do that while shooting action!!). There are many instances where wrong WB setting will bring a dramatic effect to the image. Consider the following example-
Each one of the images were clicked using different WB setting and each one of them came different. Now its up to you to decide which one you like.
The last setting, Manual, is a bit complicated though. It requires you to take a photo and direct the camera to use that picture as reference picture. Professionals use 18% grey cards for doing this. Lets skip that part for now. I shall write a detailed post regarding this later on.
Like my previous post, I am posting a video which demonstrates WB and the settings to be made in a very simple way-
Hope this post helps someone in getting the concept right. I know a lot of beginners get confused by so many settings and thats quite natural. If you are getting too bogged down, then switch to auto and shoot away, there's really nothing wrong . But its important to know the basics, otherwise in rare instances where the lighting is really tricky, our shots can get ruined and we won't have a clue whats wrong. So, my suggestion is, start taking pictures, lots of them. Sure, at first you will make mistakes, but thats the only way to learn. So keep clicking. Signing off for now. Ciao..
No comments:
Post a Comment