White balance with anything...

L

lachefilms

Well-known member
Can I white balance without using those special warm cards and actually simply using a piece of paper of the same color? Those cards cost a fortune. What's the purpose if once can just get a piece of paper?
 
You can white balance on anything you want. Even a piece of orange paper. All you are doing is telling the camera to reference that as white and then all other colors will adjust in relation to that. So it all depends on how accurate you want your white blance to be.
 
The only point of the WarmCards is that it is predictable and repeatable. It's more of a professional solution, but you can use anything.
 
You can print a set of blueish paper prints and use those as white balance or warm cards. Costs next to nothing.
 
I just white balanced on a big red bouncy ball i found in my yard. The image was very green, almost like night vision but still kinda CSI contrasty and hard if you know what i mean. I've white balanced by jeans before too. I white balance on everything to see what it'll do to the colors. makes for great effects. cheap too!
 
anything that has color can be a white balance card ie: clothes, walls, books(i use the ones with flat colors), colored paper (the ones that children use for drawing), and the list is endless so try with whatever you have near you and you'll achieve the look you want.
 
A trick I used when shooting news was to whitebalance on cement, should get you in the ball park. Also, in a pinch you can just zoom out wide and white balance - seemed to work every time I had to do it.
 
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