Thursday, June 24, 2010

Photographers: Custom White Balance

Plain and simple: If you are not shooting using custom white balance via kelvin on your camera - you are missing out. I learned a few years back by Mike Colon to shoot this way and now it is second nature - I will never shoot without it. I find that after exposure, white balance is the key to a proper looking image. I know, I know, many are going to argue that they shoot RAW and they do it all in post anyways, but why not save yourself a step? I am not going to get into the argument of RAW vs JPEG, but one key reason I do shoot jpeg is because I like to preserve the white balance settings I set in my camera at the time of shooting. There are 5 reasons I believe custom setting your white balance on the fly will improve your photography:

1. Greatly reduces your time spent post-processing for any white balance issues.

2. Gives better straight out of camera shots.

3. Gives better consistency between groupings of images and their specific lighting situations.

4. You will learn a lot more about how to capture better skin tones, etc. by correctly white balancing a scene.

5. Why wouldn't it? The more you understand about your camera and how to manually set your settings the better off you are!


If you have any questions about this topic or anything else feel free to contact me at brandon@brandon-aguiar.com

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