Colour balance

With film cameras things were more tricky with regard to recording true colour. The light source’s can appear quite different to film than to the eye as we have a generally excellent ability to compensate for different lighting. With film we needed to either use certain types of film or filters to make sure the camera records a neutral light (rather than too red or blue).

Digital cameras are still sensitive to the colour of the lights but we don’t use filters anymore. Instead the camera has a white balance setting to do this for us.

Most digital cameras have several main settings which should cover most lighting types:

• Auto white balance
• Daylight (sunny day)
• Shade (shaded areas outside)
• Cloudy (cloudy days)
• Tungsten (normal light bulbs)
• Fluorescent (ie strip lights)
• Flash
• Custom
• Colour temperature (manually set)

The above list represents some of the common settings (your manual will explain the differences). The auto setting will take a good stab at the right setting automatically. More specific settings such as ‘daylight’ (where the scene is lit with full Sun in a blue sky) give better results. If you are photographing your product outdoors on a cloudy day then the ‘cloudy’ setting should be used. The other settings speak for themselves. Inside photography using a normal light bulb would need the camera to be set on ‘tungsten’. The final option in the above list is ‘colour temperature’. This may not appear on your camera. This allows you to set the exact temperature but you need a colour temperature metre for this so we can safely forget this one!

By far the most useful setting (and the most accurate for normal product photography) is the ‘custom white balance’ option. If this is available on your camera it allows you to photograph a white card (any card will do) then allow the camera to set itself to that card. I actually use a grey card (so long as its neutral it needn’t actually be white) and set it to the lighting conditions at the time. If it’s in the studio or with constant lighting then I’ll only need to set the white balance this way once. It’s really quite easy.

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