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white balance off?
I’m shooting large paintings for a production with my Canon GL2. I used two lights and shot them during the afternoon with drapes drawn but no blackout curtains so I’m sure some daylight seeped in. I manually white balanced, but after the balance was set, I noticed that the colors I was seeing in the lcd screen were significantly off from the painting–pinks looked purple. I tried re-setting the white balance manually a few times, tried the preset white balance for indoor lighting (which I’ve never used before)–but the colors weren’t true. Any thoughts on what I was doing wrong?
One other question–earlier in the shoot, as I’d pan slowly across one painting, there seemed to be the kind of effect you see if you pan or look across a wire screen (like on a screen door), that was moving through the frame as I tried to shoot the painting. This didn’t occur on any of the other paintings. Any thoughts on what may have been causing that?
Thanks a lot for any help.
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2 Replies
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[Ruby Gold] “I noticed that the colors I was seeing in the lcd screen were significantly off from the painting”
LCD screens are NOT accurate for judging color or level.
For critical work you need to plug the camcorder into a properly calibrated NTSC (or PAL) external “CRT” monitor.
The best color quality you can hope for on prosumer camcorders is to CAREFULLY set the iris level and then CAREFULLY set the White Balance (push the button and let the camera set itself) on a pure white source.
Any video can’t perfectly reproduce the subtlety of color from art paintings, but with a single kind of light source and accurate white balance, it should look very nice.
If you’re going to do a lot of shooting where you need to have accuracy of monitoring, get an CRT (standard “picture tube”) monitor like one from the Sony PVM series (i.e. Sony PVM-8041).
Don’t put your trust in any LCD video monitor for judging color or iris-level accuracy. -
[Ruby Gold] “One other question–earlier in the shoot, as I’d pan slowly across one painting, there seemed to be the kind of effect you see if you pan or look across a wire screen (like on a screen door), that was moving through the frame as I tried to shoot the painting. This didn’t occur on any of the other paintings. Any thoughts on what may have been causing that?”
This is called a moir
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