What is White Balance & it’s Camera Settings?

Hey everybody! Today we are going to talk about camera basics! Again!

My intention with these 2 camera basics videos is to go through all those little, random settings that your camera has, so when you sit down to record, you know what all those things mean. Because I’ve been there too - picking up a camera and not knowing what all the little buttons and symbols mean and all of a sudden my image was too bright and totally blown out and how do I fix that? Does the camera have a restart button?

Today we are going to stick to talking about white balance.

1st - white balance - what is it? Well your eye and brain are pretty amazing because they will take all the available light they see and adjust it to make it appear white.

BUT light is not white! In actuality light is not white. Daylight is more of a blue color and tungsten bulbs are more yellow. So while your eye and brain can take these blues and yellows and correct them and make white, your camera can’t, so we have to do something called white balance. You set up your shot with lighting, and then you tell your camera - ok, in this lighting setup, with these colored lights, this is what I want to be actually white - and your camera will adjust and show you with your eyes automatically see.

So for example let’s say you’ve come home from work, had dinner, and it’s nighttime and that’s when you have time to record. You set up your shot with available lights you have in your house, they are tungsten bulbs, and all of a sudden everything looks orange in your camera! How do I fix this?? Scroll over to the tungsten icon under white balance and there you go, your camera will compensate for all the yellow light and make it look normal.

The same situation could happen if you are shooting outside and everything starts looking blue, or just a little too cool, use the appropriate outdoor setting on your camera’s white balance for the environment you are in, and you are telling your camera to compensate for the light to make things look balanced and normal.

You’ll see lots of different icons for white balance on your camera. You can always use the auto icon and that’s more than likely going to get you where you need to be. But if for some reason it doesn’t, now you know how to correct for that. 

Now if you want to get really wild you’ll see the K icon. That stands for Kelvin - color temperature is measured in degrees of Kelvin. The higher the number the cooler the light, and the lower the number the warmer the light. So daylight is around 5500K and tungsten is around 3000K. So you can always go to the K icon on your camera and change the kelvin degrees for your scene.

Something to remember is if you are shooting with multiple cameras, you are going to want to match white balances across each camera, and one way to do that is by setting each to the same kelvin. That way you don’t wind up with a bunch of footage that was shot at the same time, in the same place, but looks wildly different because each camera was reading the light in a different way, and then you’re at home trying frantically to color correct everything to match and it’s just terrible.

Leave a comment below if you’ve ever had to fix it in post.

That’s all from me! I’ll see you in the next one!