Alright, now that we have the foundation on the control, shutter speed, aperture and ISO, we're going to move on to some of the more subtle things that are still going to contribute to your photo. Now the next one is white balance. White Balance is a little bit tricky to understand, but once you do is you click and really help you out. Sometimes you'll take a photo and it will seem a little bit too cold or a little bit too hot. The cold photos tend to have a more bluish tone to them and the hot photos tend to be more orange and red. And your camera has an auto white balance feature.

And what it does is it tries to look for a neutral gray in the photo and it calibrates all the other colors off of that gray. It works good a lot of the times, but there are some times when that auto white balance can't find a neutral gray, and it just makes a guess and it doesn't always come out right. There's other ways to control your white balance and your camera and you may have seen different settings, the cloudy day settings, sunlight, fluorescent light, they have little icons, and they're in the white balance menu wherever it might be on your camera. And those are preset white balance settings for certain situations that are usually the same. So for instance, if you go outside and it's a sunny day and you set your white balance to sunny day, then it's going to be really close in the ballpark and get you a good balanced photo.

The same idea for if it's a cloudy day, you'll put your camera on a cloudy day and get a photo that looks just about right. But it's really helpful to understand what the cameras actually doing and why those settings are changing the way that your photo looks. That way ultimately, you can get to the point where you can use manual white balance and you actually tell the camera the color temperature. Now color temperature needs to be understood first, and color temperatures measured on a scale with the unit of Kelvin and what you need to understand is 5500 Kelvin is typically what a sunny day in the middle of afternoon is going to be set to 5500 to 6000 k in that range. Now we can kind of get our brains wrapped around that and then work off of that. So when you're inside and you flip on an incandescent light bulb, that's going to be right around 2700 K. And if you're on a cloudy day you go outside, that's going to be upwards into the 7000 8000 k range for the neutral level.

Light bulbs in a house like an incandescent light bulb are very warm. So it's a little bit counterintuitive because you set the Kelvin on the camera to a lower temperature when it's warmer. And when you go outside and it's cloudy. The light tends to be cooler on a cloudy day, but you're bumping that white balance temperature Up to a higher number. So what's going on? So here's a way to think about it when you're in a room with a light bulb on, and it's incandescent, and I keep saying Candela, because there's many different types of light bulbs, one being incandescent, another being fluorescent, we have LED lighting now, and all these different weddings have different light bulbs have different color temperatures.

And even the LED bulbs, they have different color temperatures within the LED type. Same thing with some of the fluorescent light bulbs, you'll see on the package, you'll see a Kelvin rating on a lot of light bulbs. It's telling you how warm or how cold they are. Sometimes they give you the actual temperature and a lot of times they'll say it's a daylight bulb, or it's a soft, warm light and things like that. And those are all referencing what color temperature light bulb is. But for our example purpose, we're going to go with a traditional incandescent bulb which is 2700 Kelvin.

And if we take our camera we want to take a photograph under this light. What we need to tell our camera is hey, we've got a warm, light source. And we've got to compensate for that. So we're gonna drop our cameras color temperature down to match with that light bulb is 2700 K, we would set our white balance to 2700 K, and the camera knows what the light source is, and how warm it is. And it's going to calibrate the colors to that color temperature. Now, it's the same thing when you go outside and it's maybe toward the end of the day, and it's cloudy, so you don't have the the warmer light coming from the sun, that's going to be a very cool light.

And you're going to need to tell the camera Hey, we got to add one thing to this photo to get it to a neutral place. So you've bumped that seven 8000 k. Now, these are all ways to get the camera to be neutral. Sometimes for artistic purposes, you may want to purposely take a photo at the wrong color balance. And you might be trying to make a photo feel a lot warmer than it is in its real environment or whatever it may be. So you can take some creative life Since with this, but we're gonna focus on how to take a properly exposed properly calibrated white balanced photo. So within that whole color temperature scale is another adjustment that you have control of which is the tin, we've got white balance that's going to be on the Kelvin scale from generally down into the low 2000s, all the way up to the high 10,000 range, and you have control over that.

And then you have 10, which is going to be a green and magenta range. And you can almost think of white balance being up and down and then you've got pink and magenta going left and right. And you can adjust that. And the reason we have the pink and the magenta tint control is because light sources have color tints to them as well. One notorious one is fluorescent lighting has a very green tint to it. And if you want to balance that out, and get rid of that 10 so that you don't have Have a photo that looks like everybody's an alien or whatever, then you're going to need to add some pink into that photo, because pink and green are opposite on the color wheel.

So you're going to get the pink added to cancel out some of the green that's already been thrown out by the light that you have. And you're going to end up in a neutral place where your whites look white. So, white balance is tough to get the hang of, and it takes a lot of practice, but once you get it, you will get to the point where you walk into a room or you walk into a scene and you say, Hey, you know what I noticed about 4000 cam I need a little bit of pink tint to get this neutralized and you can usually get in the ballpark just by looking at a room. Right now I'm shooting this video and I have neutral video lights. They are set to put off a 5500 k light color. And so I know I can just set my camera to 5500 K, and I'm all set.

It's not always that simple, especially when you're not in control of light. But you will get a feel for it and you'll figure it out. After trying it a lot of times, so I do encourage you to go on to the manual white balance and mess around with those settings and see how it affects the photo and see if you can start to get to the point where you can just kind of shoot from the hip and guess get in the ballpark and put a new camera, take the photo and maybe have to make a minor adjustment, but you won't be way off. When you're photographing, you have the choice in your camera a lot of times to shoot in JPEG format or raw format. And this matters for white balance, because if you're shooting JPEG, that white balance setting that you shot in is baked into that file, and you can pull it into a computer and go into post production and adjust the white balance.

But unfortunately, because JPEG is compressed file format, what you're going to do is start to lose quality in that image and your colors are going to start to get a little weird looking if you try to push the white balance too far from what you originally set in the camera. The beauty of a raw file is that you can adjust the white balance as extreme as you want and never have any change in the quality of the file. Changing white balance in post production on a raw file is exactly the same as changing the white balance at the time of shooting in the camera. So theoretically, if you want it to be a little bit lazy, you could shoot photos on your camera and ignore white balance and do it all in post production. As long as you're shooting RAW, and have absolutely no difference in the output.

I don't recommend that because if you start to shoot a good amount of volume, then you're going to have a lot of post production work to do. So getting it right in camera is helpful. It also lets you see what it is you're photographing and the way that it's going to look so you don't have any surprises when you get to post production. But cameras are getting better and better as the technology improves and auto white balance is getting better and better. A few years ago, I would say shoot manual white balance no matter what and be in control of what it's doing. Now, I would say if you're an event photography, specifically because you tend to have environments that change really frequently in your life.

Do the gun for pressure and all that you can mostly get away with auto white balance on a good camera. I still shoot manual white balance because I'm so used to it because that's how I learned and that's what I've done for years and I, I can get to the settings really quickly. But it's not something I would focus on if you don't have all the other things fully under control and have complete mastery over them such as shutter speed, ISO, and aperture specifically. But once you do get those, I think over the long term, you're going to be better served by running white balance on a manual setting. So a quick recap and a little bit of a cheat sheet, if you will. White Balance is measured on a scale of Kelvin.

It goes from about 2000 to 10,000. Daylight in the middle of the day is about 5500 K. So if your photo looks a little bit blue, then you need to warm up. And in order to warm up. You crank your white balance up to a higher number. If you Before looks too warm, too hot, to orange to red, then you need to reduce your white balance in your camera and bring that setting down to a lower number. pink and green are going to sneak in depending on the light source.

You will adjust those as you see fit. But you should know that fluorescent lights tend to have a green tint to them. LED lights sometimes have a pink tint, but that varies because there's so many different types of LED lights of different quality and different levels. So white balance is going to help you get control in any situation that you're in. One problem that you're going to run into that white balance isn't always going to save you from when it comes to color is mixed light. So for instance, if I have these lights here at 5500 K, and then I also had a lamp on in the room that was at 2700 K. Well now you've got a mixed light source and you can only white balance for one of them.

So you can either take a middle of the road approach and Go for somewhere in the 4000s. And you're going to have a bit of a compromise, you could balance for the 5500 K, and that lamp is going to look very orange, you could balance for the lamp at 2700 K, but then those other lights are going to look extremely blue and cold. So the only thing you can do in those situations is take control the light sources if you can turn one of them off and leave the other ones on, or make the compromise or turn the photo black and white. One last bit of color related information that I want to give to you is the other parameter that lights will have on them sometimes is the CRI, and that's the color rendering index. And what that's telling you essentially is it's a number from zero to 100.

And the closer to 100 that you get, the more of the amount of visible colors, that light is going to illuminate essentially. So if you have a light bulb with a CRI of 50 that's a pretty low CRI and what's going to happen There's going to be colors in the spectrum that are completely left out, because that light is not going to illuminate those particular frequencies. And that will essentially be dark. And we don't see things like this with our eyes, we're not going to see some color completely missing out of a light, but a camera will be more sensitive to it. And you're gonna have a tough time once in a while and you'll try to be white balancing you say I can't quite get it right. Sometimes if your light sources are really low quality light source, that's more of a problem and white balance is going to change anything.

The sun is a perfect 100 it's going to have all the colors in it. Incandescent tungsten filament light bulbs are 100 and when you get into the fluorescence and the LEDs, they're all over the place. You can buy a really high end LED light, you're going to get into the high 9899 range, you can get really high up there anything above 95 is going to look really nice, you're not going to tell any difference when you start to get into the low 80s. Especially into the 70s you To start seeing issues, so just something to look out for, especially if you're looking for video lights, or if you're looking to use constant lights for photography. Those are really important specifications and you don't want to get a low CRI light source because it's going to look a little bit off and it's hard to put your finger on, but that's what the issue usually is.