Colour temp..?

macvisual

macvisual

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Peter
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Sorry, complete novice query.

Recently bought a 5D (Mk1), I've no idea about colour temp in the menu setting or what it does, so many adjustable number setting.......totally lost..?

I was recently advised to keep it set at '5600k', might this be ok and why?


Thanks in advance!
 
Very simply:
Colour Temp. is to do with the colour of the light illuminating the scene.
So red light has a lower temp. than blue light.
You use the White Balance adjustment on your camera to ensure that white comes out white and does not have a colour tint, and therefore other colours are what they are supposed to be.

Have a look here for more info:
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/white-balance.htm
 
macvisual said:
I was recently advised to keep it set at '5600k', might this be ok and why?
Click to expand...

It might be OK - if you only ever take photos in bright daylight. If you ever take pictures when it's cloudy, or indoors, or with a flash then it'll give you the wrong colours.


As for why you were advised that? I don't know, were you talking to an idiot at the time? Because that would explain it.


Luckily you relaised that such advise may not be 100% kosher and came to TP for decent advice. If you use Auto White Balance then your 5D will get colours right almost all of the time.
 
There's a very simple answer - shoot in RAW and forget about colour temperature on the camera, simply adjust the colour temp in the editing stage.
 
macvisual said:
What does DPP mean please?

I got two cd's with my 5D Mk1.
Click to expand...
Digital Photo Professional which is raw processing software. It will be on one of the two CDs which came with your camera.
 
Colour temp without getting into the chemistry/physics behind it is how you set what a neutral colour is in your photo. The sun is a good reference point and is roughly 5600K which is probably why you were recommended that. Outdoors, sunshine, 5600K, good place to be!

But if we wander into the shade, well, the light goes a little blueish. Our eyes are really good at adjusting to this on the fly but cameras, well, auto is usually pretty good there but sometimes they need a nudge. I tend to just use the presets rather than dial in kelvin temps so i'll just set it to cloudy and that stops everything having a light blue cast.

Then we wander inside, household lightbulbs tend to be a little bit more orangey so i'll change my cam to tungsten. Now, heres where it gets tricky, for the last hundred years almost we've used orangey tungsten lightbulbs but some (not all) of the energy saving bulbs people are switching to are daylight balanced! so if you had set your camera to tungsten your pictures now have a blue tinge! fun fun fun :D

and if your in an industrial space with sodium vapour lights or fluorescent or god knows what the light can tend towards green or orange or just miss out bits of the spectrum all together.

Back in the day a good lab sorted this stuff for you but now its all down to you, quite a bit of pressure eh? well, not really, raw files haven't had a colour temperature applied to them so you can shoot in auto white balance and then come back later and tweak the ones it got wrong at your leisure.

If colour is really important in your job you can buy white balance cards or another option is the x-rite color checker passport. You take a shot of the card/passport under the same light your subject will be under and then on the computer you can automatically tweak the white balance and then apply that setting to your other files.

One issue is mixing different lighting, you can't really adjust a slider and fix both at once so it gets iffy. This is why i have gels to shift my daylight balanced lights to whatever i am shooting alongside, or i try to nuke the ambient so it doesn't show up.

It really is quite a big deep subject but in practice not such a problem. Oh and shoot raw! :D
 
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