Purchased the Coffee of the Week at Starbucks a couple of days ago and was toying around with the LX3’s custom white balance that I decided to test it out on the CotW coffee bag.
Our coffee for the week is a Sumatra/Peru blend. Nice asian flavor with a good kick. This is one of Starbucks’s organic blends. We got a Starbucks Passport when we purchased this. It’s some promo that Starbucks is running where when you buy ten packs of coffee beans from Starbucks, you get one more free.
Now on to custom white balance. After reading up on it, custom white balance is basically having your camera manually adjust to the proper color adjustment for your shoot setting. Notice when you see an image you want to capture but it doesn’t come up in the right colors after you shoot it? Our eyes have the amazing ability of adjusting color and lighting but our cameras don’t. That’s why a lot of the photographers use gray cards to adjust their white balance during shoots. They re-adjust every time they move to a different spot because lighting may be different there. And although there are firmware updates to make Auto White Balance more intuitive, it still does not capture colors as well as a customized white balance does.
You notice with the image above, the shot looks bluish. I chose the coffee bag because of its multiple colors. When I said bluish, the tinge of the picture in general is cool. Probably because of the effect of the fluorescent lighting. I did not adjust the AWB towards any color so it’s set right in the middle. And yet the result still has a bluish tinge to it.
Now look at this image with the custom white balance. This is closer to what the eyes actually see. This was done after I used the LX3 to shoot a gray card first under the same lighting conditions as this coffee bag. No bluish tinge around the bag area. It may seem desaturated compared to the image above but you’ll notice that the colors on the bag are still pretty rich.
I’ve only started using custom white balance recently and the results have been interesting. The color is definitely better than my previous shots done on AWB.
This doesn’t mean though that I won’t be using AWB anymore. Of course, there are instances when you just need to pull out the camera fast and shoot a picture right away without the luxury of doing custom white balance. But for still shots where I shoot inanimate objects and I have all the time in the world to do so, I’ll utilize custom white balance on the Panasonic LX3.
How many of you actually use a gray card for shooting your toys?
No comments:
Post a Comment