White Balancing indoors, but retaining indoor look...

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filmguy123

Veteran
OK, so when I sit in my office, lit with incandescent lights, it has a nice warm, slightly orange look to it. When I shoot it on my camera, it looks ugly/orange/tungsten-ish. Not nice/warm/incandescent. If I then point at the white wall (which looks slightly orange to me, due to the ambient light), not the room looks very WHITE on the camera. But it does not look like it looks to my eye.

Basically, neither way looks right. So, how do I WB to make it look right in the camera, without any use of post color correction?
 
Sounds like you have your white balance on AUTO. Does your camera have a tungsten preset? How does the room look using that preset? Alternatively, can you white balance your camera in a different room that's a little less moody and THEN bring the camera into your office?
 
I'm curious.....does your room also get sunlight through a window, even indirectly? If so, your camera could be balancing for the sunlight, which is bluer than the incandescent (tungsten) lighting. This would cause any areas lit only by the incandescent light to look more orangey.

As kevin01 suggested, you may be using the AUTO white balance feature. While this can do a good job, you have to remember that it doesn't really have a reference for what's actually 'white' in your image. You'd be much better off doing a manual white balance onto a true white balance cards -- or maybe one of the WarmCards. You could also experiment with manually white balancing on pieces of paper -- try different shades of blue, starting with pale blues. Experimentation is going to be the key to figuring out what works in your unique situation.

Good luck!
 
As an alternative to the warm cards I just balance through a single 1/8 ctb to a white card. I like it because I always have some CTB around and its easy to change to 1/4, 1/2, etc for different effects. You could of course use CTO for the opposite effect.
 
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