What is White Balance? Accurate Colors in Your Videos

Make Sure Your Colors Are Correct If You Use a Video Camera

If you were confused by the title suggesting that you don’t need a video camera to create videos for your website, good news!  You don’t need a camera to create video for your website.  Check the site for more on that if you’re interested: http://homebrewvideo.com/video-production-tip-video-without-a-video-camera

For those using a video camera:

Do you know what white balance is?  It turns out that unless specifically told, your camera (still and video alike) does not know how to render the color white.  You have to tell it what “white” looks like.  Have you ever seen a video or picture where there is sort of a blue-ish ting to everything.  That is likely due to the camera having an incorrect white balance, which then makes ALL the colors a little off.

If that effect is what you’re after, great.  But if you’re looking for accurate color, you’ll need to set the white balance manually if you can (most modern cameras have a manual setting).  And if you’re thinking you’re OK if your camera has “automatic white balance,” you might want to do a test between a manual setting and the automatic.  All too often the auto setting does not do a very good job, since the camera is making its best guess at what white should look like.

Look at the first picture above.  That was with an automatic white balance setting.  Then I placed a white board (you can do this with a sheet of paper or anything else that represents “white” and can fill the picture frame when setting white balance) in front of the camera and selected the manual white balance setting, thereby teaching the camera what white should look like.

Then I took the second picture.  Notice how the first picture has a sort of orange-y tint to it compared to the second one.  You can see, especially when you compare them side-by-side that the second one (the one on the right) shows a more accurate color pallet.

By the way, these still pictures were taken with my camcorder (video camera), which is a Canon Vixia HF21.

So there’s a pretty pain-free way to improve the quality of your videos.

Good luck!

Ken