The Wheel of Color is a Crafty Mistress

Posted by Keith · March 18th, 2008

Your eyes are some funky organs. They perform a whole throng of intricate calculations and functions every second, almost all going unnoticed by their owner and occurring, forgive me, in the blink of an eye. It’s because of this artful sneakiness that we have to deal with color temperature issues when shooting on video or film.

Typically, indoor lighting fixtures will emit more of an orange light than that of outdoor conditions, which is bluish. The eye is quick to adjust so that color appears normal to your vision, without the various tints of orange or blue. Video cameras do not work in this way, unless we tell them to. They pick up the variations in color with no normalization, so that when we view our recordings in playback we may see a tint of color that wasn’t noticeable to us while shooting.

This is why Color Balancing is so important. You must give the camera a reference point so that it can determine the correct look of all other colors. In videography, we use white as that reference, which is why you may have heard the term “White Balancing.” To white balance, you take an object that is white, like a piece of paper, and place it beneath the lighting conditions. You then fill the camera’s frame with the object, so that it sees nothing but white and then indicate to the camera that all other colors must be fall in line with this one.

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