I don't get why white balance was built this way.

[Shooter]

I'm not aiming to make the light white, but different colors based on the mood of the scene.

Kind of a crude / broad brush stroke way of doing things. ( You are just wanting to cast a color over everything like a filter does)

So..you may as well just use the preset color temps in your camera ( Tungsten, Daylight, Over Cast, Fluoro etc - they have little handy icons in the WB Menu) ...then in your NLE ...just apply a filter such as Sepia, Tint or a Fast Color corrector.

 

[Alpha Beta Omega]

I seldom use white cards. Often I use a white surface, be it a paper or wall, to calibrate white. Dialing in like when shooting in S-log works fine but the more baked in images from i.e Panasonic AF100 gains on doing a white balance. The color shift can be sever sometimes and the only way to get it right is to do AWB.

When I shoot with the 5D3 I find myself setting manual kelvins when working in an environment that has very low kelvins because it can give erratics results in AWB.

 

[j1clark@ucsd.edu]

Okay thanks. But sometimes with color cards, we still cannot get the right temperature in each of our cameras to match. I would like to get a camera where I can dial it in manually. Is their any camera around the same price as the T3i, where I can, or not too much higher of a price? Since I am trading in my camera for just the one feature, I hope not to pay too much more. But having to use different colored cards is just more complicated, especially when trying to get my footage to match other cameras, while shooting, since not all the cameras have the same color. My friend's cameras, have to be dialed a little differently to match. So I figure it's best just to get the Kelvin manual option. Or is selling my camera to get on with the Kelvin feature not going to make a difference and it's not much more of an advantage really? I'm not aiming to make the light white, but different colors based on the mood of the scene.

The thing is... sometimes things are just 'complicated'...

Using 'white' cards that hare 'shaded', to give an over all color cast are a 'simple' way of adjusting the camera 'color controls'. To do that manually would require that you have a (expensive) calibrated color meter, know how to use it, and have a camera that can accommodate such a setting.

The 'quick' way to do this is to have a 'white card'... 'white cards' are available in 'neutral', or with a yellow/brown or blue cast, to cause complementary color cast in the resulting image (don't know what complementary colors are... look them up...).

Just setting the K value will not adjust for a complex cast. All that does is adjust for a 'single' source, or if multiple sources of light, they all have the same basic spectrum... the Sun is the single largest source of light... and depending on the time of day the light that reaches the earth will have different colors 'filtered' by the air. Sunrise/sunset warms/reds, etc. (look up general color temperature of sun light during the day for details...).

If the situation has multiple lighting sources, with different spectra (plural of spectrum...), then a more complex adjustment is required...

With a 'white card' all those contributing colors can be 'dialed out' or at least 'mitigated' to yield for a 'white card' approximately equal values of the digitized color intensities...

The problem with matching up different cameras, especially cameras from different vendors, is that each vendor has their own engineering idea about the response of the sensor's 'red', 'green' and 'blue' channels, and may have different values for 'low intenstity', 'mid intensity', or 'high intensity'... so setting 'white balance' for 'white' will only correct things that are 'white' or very nearly 'white'... the 'shadows' may be off...

How more expensive cameras deal with this is to provide a 'Look Up Table' capability (LUT) which a digital technician loads into the camera or processing computer for display. Here often the 'raw' or even 'lightly compressed' data directly from the camera is not altered, but the display LUTs are manipulated so as to give the director and DoP an indication of 'what the result will be'...

For the DSLR shooter, this sort of sophistication is done in 'post' and given the limitations of the compressed data, only limited adjustments can be made without severely impacting the quality of the image.

But for most consumer and low end prosumer cameras 'white balance' is sufficient for most purposes...

In the olden days, Film film was pretty much fixed to Tungsten and Daylight color balances, and one had to use filters either on the camera during shooting, or in the printing process.

With digital cameras a large amount of control can be at the 'shooting' end... but then that requires study to understand how to control that capability.

 

[j1clark@ucsd.edu]

I seldom use white cards. Often I use a white surface, be it a paper or wall, to calibrate white. Dialing in like when shooting in S-log works fine but the more baked in images from i.e Panasonic AF100 gains on doing a white balance. The color shift can be sever sometimes and the only way to get it right is to do AWB.

When I shoot with the 5D3 I find myself setting manual kelvins when working in an environment that has very low kelvins because it can give erratics results in AWB.

The difficult with 'shooting something 'white'' in the location is... somethings 'white' are not 'really white'... From the Wife's wedding biz it became obvious that 'keying off the 'white' dress' didn't work... because the 'white' dress was a off-white of some sort, depending on the tastes of the bride, it could be twinged with 'brown' or perhaps 'blue'... depending...

So, some sort of 'white' standard was in order.

As a note, we would sometimes send back prints of shots that had been taken with Film film negative materials, because the printer had 'color balanced' to the 'white' dress, but the Bride had in fact an off-white dress...

 

[ironpony]

Okay thanks. If I set my camera to AWB though, the white balance could change while shooting though. That happened once. I forgot to set it and I did a dolly scene towards an actor, and you can see the white balance change during the dolly tracking.