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Tricking Your Camera into a Warm "White" Balance
 My
camera's auto white balance
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 White
balanced off of a piece of paper
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"White" balanced off of a very blue mousepad |
I'm reluctant to write this because I've discovered a secret to taking a
good picture/video and I don't want to share it. But it's too good to keep
to myself. It has to do with white balance. White balance, if you're not
familiar, is calibrating your camera or video camera to read true color
by exposing it to something pure white, like a piece of paper or a custom
white card that photographers sometimes carry. The camera uses that white
to then figure out how to render the rest of the color spectrum. The thing
is, digital recording devices can tend to white balance a bit cold, meaning
that a camera calibrated to a pure white card or piece of paper can produce
images that overemphasize blues and whites. The trick is then to calibrate
to a "false white;" that is telling the camera to use a non-white
color to start its color readings from. Calibrating from a card that's a
very light blue will trick the camera into boosting up reds, oranges, and
yellows -- the colors that make a photo look warm and just a bit sexy. It
can be overdone, sure. Any overly warm photo can verge on looking sepia.
Or like a gauzy Lifetime movie. But a bit of blue can set the camera
to produce a look that's similar to the golden hour -- that time of day,
usually late afternoon, where there's a golden cast to the light and things
tend to look their best. A message board post I read said that military
photographers have been using this trick for years by "white"
balancing off of their dress blue shirts. Being a civilian, I found one
company that makes a product called Warm
Cards. I now desperately want a pack. But at $45 for the digital camera
set, I'm going to hold off just a bit. Still, I was able to produce the
effect by balancing off of my mousepad, a paperback copy of One Hundred
Years of Solitude, and other blue things lying around the house.
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