Professional
photography requires a whole host of experience, talent and equipment.
Since we know that budgets are sometimes tight and don't stretch to
commissioning a professional We would nonetheless like to offer some
help with our monthly tips page. Do let us know if they are of help!
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.
It’s
important to get the white balance as close
as you can with your product pictures so the colours in the final image
appear
true to life.
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