White Balance | An Education
It's the first Wednesday of the month and this post is all about Custom White Balance!
Wow, when we think back on the last few years we have learned so much about our photography equipment and how to utilize it better. Our biggest tidbit is to use your camera on MANUAL, but once you have that down start adding in some additional skills! One of our favorites is Custom White Balance (sorry, we're going to get a bit technical this month). We first learned about ExpoDiscs from our friends, Julianna & Nathan Rennard. Since they're Nikoners we had to do some searching ourselves online and in our manuals to learn how to use these beautiful mechanisms!
You'll see in the photo below that Erik is using his white balance disc over his lens while he's standing in front of his subject (our cute couple Lovey & Cory). Once he's metered to zero and snaps a quick photo he then checks his histogram to see if it's balanced. The white balance card gives perfect coloring, meaning our whites will look white and the color will be just how the eye sees it (not an off color with a blue tint).
Once you've taken the photo you simply go into your camera Menu and find the button for White Balance. Switch it to Custom. Then you should have a tab under the White Balance setting that says Custom WB. Once you tap on Custom WB it will show you the photo you just took with the white balance card over your lens. All you have to do is hit the SET button and it will ask you if you want to 'Use WB data from this image for Custom WB' and you click OK. Your camera may have different settings (this is our Canon 5D Mark ll) so we definitely recommend looking it up in your manual.
Seriously, this has saved us so much time in editing and making sure our images are perfect IN CAMERA! If you're not doing this, try it. At first it will take awhile. We felt a bit slow in the beginning, but once we got the hang of it the process was super fast. Just listen to batman...
Lesson Learned: Get an EXPOdisc and learn to use it.
Let us know if you try this technique and how it goes! ~Erik & Marissa