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White Balancing A Office Set
I am shooting in a office set and can’t seem to find a color temperature to balance the overheads with my lights.
I started with Daylight Kinos w/ full green gel but that didn’t work. After trial and error we were using tungsten with full green but I still get the green color.
The only way to make it look decent it using the fluorescent pre-set
Tungsten by itself is magenta and with even a 1/2 green it still is a too green.Wondering if anyone else had any issue with these?
Thanks!
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3 Replies
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Getting your lights gelled to be a similar color is only step one of two. You still have to white balance your camera, even if your light all matches–getting it all to look fluorescent green only makes it match. White balancing is what gets your color to look neutral.
Get all your non-fluorescent sources gelled with a fluorescent CTF gel, and use the fluorescent WB preset on your camera, or do a manual white balance. Even if there are minor differences in hue, you should be able to get a solid WB and grade it to your liking. The lower of your two images looks pretty good to me–is that the one where you used the preset?
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Thanks for the response! Shooting on 5D by the way. The lower image was just straight tungsten. Pardon my ignorance but what is the ctf gel? Just heard of cto and ctb.
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CTF is just referring to a fluorescent gel.
Yeah, so on the 5D, you have several options; use the Auto WB (not recommended when you need the color control), do a manual WB (more in a sec), use the preset, or set Kelvin manually.
Doing a manual WB is a pain in the ass on Canon DSLRs. You have to take a photo of the scene, then go into a menu to select the area of the photo that you want to use as the manual white balance. It sucks.
Frankly, you’re better off just using the Fluorescent preset. It will be close enough that you can nudge your footage one way or the other in the edit.
The other option is to set a Kelvin number manually, and then use the WB Shift option to offset the green-to-magenta shift manually.
I’d just use the Fluorescent preset.
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