White Balance question...

armisiano

armisiano

Veteran
I wasn't sure exactly where to post this, so away to the cafe.

Has anyone tried using different colored, or more specifically tinted, surfaces to do a white balance? Random example: I've found sometimes when I have some lights set up, and say everything's a bit too warm, I'll do a white balance only to be dissapointed that things were SO neutralized, and that playing with the color temp settings seem to give it an oddly orange or blue washed over look. So I'm thinking of getting a few sheets of paper (or just printing them myself) in different off-white tones, pastels maybe, to use for white balancing. Has anyone else done this? Or do you usually just wait until post to play around a bit more? I just personally love the look of the footage if it "hits the visual mark" before having to (or WITHOUT having to) do any color correcting. Thoughts?
 
This is a different topic all together that has been discussed a million times... POST vs in-camera.

Purists will say, do it all in camera, but IMO most of us who have come into things in the digital age say - shoot CLEAN, do it in post. There is very little drawback to just doing all of this in post; unless it is an extreme look, or requires a lot of color correction - then it will look cleaner in camera, or so I hear.

But I wouldn't know. I always shoot clean and add effects, filters, and Color Correction in editing...

You could pull a search for this and find much more detailed discussion, though.

Basically by white balancing to a different color, you are just shifting the HUE.
 
Reminds me of reading American Cinematographer magazine. Some have a wide variety of filters, some wouldn't put a filter on the camera for anything!

Honestly, I prefer to shoot clean and grade in post. But maybe that's because I don't have a mattebox, and I haven't used a pro-mist, or a grad sky, or anything like that. I've used filters for still photography, but that was before photoshop.

I have never seen anything that could emulate a polarizer in post. So that's one filter I'd be interested in using. But coloring in the camera isn't something I'd be that happy doing.
 
Go ahead; several people have. :thumbsup:

I once saw a list of the exact colors used in Warm Cards. Alas, I cannot find it now.
 
Same thing, except that with proper planning and thorough pre-production, it only takes an extra minute or two to do it on set, and increasingly more time to do it in post depending on how complex you want to get, especially once you factor in render times.

Submitted for your consideration.
 
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