Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I. Copyright © 2003 – 2009 Kenji Tachibana White Balance & Color 10 slides

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I White Balance & Color: Background: The various light sources around us have different color temperatures from candle light warm to skylight blue (cyan). Lord Kelvin, a British mathematical physicist and engineer. measured the color of various light sources. Sunlight is 6,000 K and the ‘K’ stands for Kelvin.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I White Balance & Color: Kelvin Temperature: Approximate scale Type of Light Color Temperature in K Candle Flame 1,500 Incandescent 3,000 Sunrise, Sunset 3,500 Midday Sun, Flash 5,500 Bright Sun, Clear Sky 6,000 Cloudy Sky, Shade 7,000 Blue Sky 9,000

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I White Balance & Color: Mature Technology: White Balance (WB) refers to a mature technology originally developed for the video industry when VHS was the modern recording medium of the day. The WB mechanism looks for a white reference point in the scene. It then calculate all the other colors based on this white point.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I White Balance & Color: Keep It Simple: Set the WB to Auto Trying to set the proper light source temperature is best done after you figure out what ‘light source’ means. I’ve noticed from inspecting the assignment light-source shots that many of you are still confused about the ‘light source’ topic. My mid-quarter recommendation is for all of you to continue to set the WB on Auto. Even in Art 115, my WB recommendation is to keep it on Auto.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I White Balance & Color: Auto WB: Rare failure I noticed this very interesting looking ‘splotch’ on the ground in the NSCC Visitor's Parking Lot. On the Playback, I noticed that the yellow subject lost its Punch. And that the reason was WB error. It saw the yellow patch as white, a rare failure…

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I White Balance & Color: Match the Light Source: I reshot it with the WB set to Cloudy based on what I saw. Although it’s obviously over corrected but much closer.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I White Balance & Color: Rotate Image: My initial response to the splotch was ‘Ah, funny looking paint dropping.’ I did not get the same feeling when I reviewed the image in Playback. So I reshot using mainly camera rotation to find the most humorous angle.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I White Balance & Color: Mooz Back: Frame wider I also backed off because I thought that the context was important. Filling-the-frame idea didn’t seem to work.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I White Balance & Color: Lab Work: I cropped, processed, and rotated again trying to get that pure visual joke. This does it for me and the original scene was not altered in any way…

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I x End