How to set up Custom White Balance Digital Photography and Video

Hi there, It's Marlene Hielema, from ImageMaven.Com and in this video blog post going to
teach you how to do custom white balance. You can use this technique for your
still photographs or your video   When you set up your custom white
balance are going to need some sort of a reference point and I use a white balance gray card. It's
specifically meant for measuring white balance. You can also use this kind of a tool it
sometimes known as an expo desk and this fits over the lens whereas the gray card you point the
lens at it and you measure the light reflecting off it, which
actually measures the color.

Okay, so it's not for exposure but it's
for white balance. And you can set up a custom white
balance for any indoor or outdoor lighting situation so if you're
taking basketball photos of your kid at the school gym you want to take a custom white balance
of the light falling on the scene so you would hold your reference card
out and let the light fall on it or you take this and put it over your
lens and point it at the light source So here's the thing, anytime the light
changes you need to redo your custom white balance. Alright so that's it so read your
manual and learn how to set up custom white balance for your particular camera. And I'm going
to show you a couple have demos of how to do it with two of the cameras that I
own and yours will be very similar.

Okay I'm looking at the back of
the Panasonic Lumix FZ200, it's a point and
shoot camera. Right here I have my white balance control. I'm going to choose that and
right now you can see that it's on auto white balance. So I'm gonna go down to white balance, custom White Set 1.

Now I have my white balance card here I'm going to hold that in front of the
lens. I'm going to go back and I'm going to arrow over. I'm gonna
make sure that the card, the square here that comes up that's the
area that it's going to measure on my white balance card. And there I choose Set/Menu and now the custom white
balance, you can see right down there, is set up
for this camera.

If you use the disc you have to basically do the same thing
you go through the same menu but instead of holding the card in front of the lens you put this in front of the lens and
you point it at the light source. Okay let's look at
another camera. Now this is a Canon 5d Mark 2, and to get custom white balance on this
it works a little bit differently. The first thing you have to
do is go into the white balance menu and in this camera is on the top and you want to change it to custom.

So that's the custom one right
there. Okay so now we have to take a reference image. So I'll just put the grey cart in front.
There's my reference image. Then I'm going to go back into my menus, choose custom white
balance, and find the image that you just used for your custom white balance set up, and in this case it was this
particular one.

Choose that, and hit OK. That image now becomes the reference
file or the reference image for your custom
white balance setting.   So I hope you set up your custom white
balance on your next photo shoot.  Alright, thanks for watching.

It's Marlene Hielema from ImageMaven.Com. And do me a favor please share this with your
friends who need help with their white balance. Getting custom white balance will
guarantee you get better color your pictures. See you next time!.