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Color Temperature, Color Balance, White Balance. People new to photography, digital or traditional, often have a difficult time visualizing what these terms refer to. And even those who are familiar with these terms may not have a clear understanding of how they all work together.
This lesson is designed to clarify these terms and to illustrate why and how to make adjustments to your White Balance in an indoor setting.
(Click on any image below for an enlarged view.) |
Topics Covered:
- Color Temperature, Color Balance & White Balance
- How digital cameras relate to Color Temperature
- Adjusting the White Balance in a digital camera to various presets
- Differences between strobe, tungsten, fluorescent lights, and daylight
- Using light modifiers indoors to control contrast
Equipment Used:
You can click on the blue links below for more info.
Color Temperature
In basic terms, any light source (the sun, a light bulb) produces its own particular vibration, or frequency, to give it a certain Color Temperature. But since our eyes are so adaptable, the idea of Color Temperature can be somewhat confusing.
Our eyes have the amazing ability to adjust the color of any particular light source, such that a white piece of paper illuminated by any single light source will automatically appear white. You can, however, notice obvious shifts in color when witnessing a scene lit with sources of varying Color Temperature, like yellow light emanating through the windows of a house contrasted against the blue light of dusk.
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Color Temperature is measured in degrees Kelvin. The most important thing to remember in Color Temperature is that the higher the Kelvin number, the cooler (more blue) the light source. The following chart approximates a Kelvin color temperature scale (figure 1).
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 Figure 1 |
Color Balance
In a camera, Color Balance is achieved when an image is rendered close to how the eye perceives it. By setting the White Balance in your camera to match your light source, you can achieve "accurate" color, or Color Balance.
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White Balance
If you shoot with a film camera and want to achieve Color Balance in a daylight setting, you would use daylight film to match the Color Temperature of daylight. If you shoot with a film camera indoors with incandescent lighting, you would choose Tungsten film to balance the Color Temperature. If you are shooting digitally, however, achieving Color Balance in any lighting situation is just a matter of setting the White Balance in the camera.
To illustrate how the White Balance function works, we decided to shoot an indoor portrait using different Color Temperature settings. We first started by setting the White Balance to match the color temperature of the flash and activating the built-in flash of the camera.
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In the diagram to the right, you can see how different White Balance settings can affect the color balance of a shot. Remember that if you can match the color temperature of your light source with the correct White Balance setting, you will get color-balanced, or "neutral" results (figure 2).
Click on the image to enlarge if you are having trouble reading the text. |
 Figure 2 |
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The built-in flashes in most cameras are balanced to the color temperature of daylight (5500 degrees Kelvin), which is typically represented as a sun icon in the White Balance preset menu. Check your owners manual to see how to modify the WB setting (figures 3 and 4). |
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Next, activate the built-in flash of your camera. Here, we simultaneously held down the Flash Mode button and turned the Jog dial until the flash icon appeared (figures 5 & 6).
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 Figure 7 |
Once the camera was ready, we took a shot of our model in front of a sweep of white seamless paper (figure 7).
Figure 7 shows a typical result from this type of on-camera flash lighting. Since the light source is small and positioned just above the camera, the result is both flat in dimension and high in contrast. The reflections in the eyes are tiny and a distracting shadow is rendered behind the model.
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We decided to light the model using a large soft box to achieve a more natural look. Using the same methods as in figures 5 & 6, we deactivated the flash, set up a Large Photoflex Starlite Kit and positioned it to the right of him at approximately a 45-degree angle.
This Kit uses a Tungsten lamp that's Color-Balanced to about 3200-degrees Kelvin, about 2300 degrees warmer than daylight or flash (figure 8).
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 Figure 8 |
In order to balance the color, we changed the White Balance preset from the sun icon to the light bulb icon and took another shot (figures 9 and 10).
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 Figure 11 |
Notice the difference in lighting! While the color temperature in Figure 11 has been neutralized, just as it was in Figure 7, the lighting looks much more natural. The soft box has diffused the light to render a soft, wrap-around light on the model's face, giving a window light effect. |
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The correct White Balance, however, may not always be the most preferable, and much of that depends on personal taste. To show how this setup would look incorrectly color balanced, we set the White Balance back to the sun icon and took another shot (figures 12 & 13). |
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Notice how warm the shot is now. The White Balance setting is about 2300 degrees cooler than that of the tungsten-balanced Starlite, making the result very warm. And although Color Temperature in this image is not rendered correctly, it does give the shot a different mood. In fact, this image ended up being one of the model's favorites (figure 13).
As was demonstrated here, it is important to know how to adjust the White Balance of a digital camera to render accurate color as well as to create special effects. To learn how to set your White Balance in an outdoor setting, check out More Lessons on White Balance at www.webphotoschool.com
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Equipment Used:
You can click on the blue links below for more info.
Recommended Links
- To learn more about Photoflex equipment, go to www.photoflex.com
- For more detailed digital photography lessons, visit
www.webphotoschool.com
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