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White Balance

Lesson 22 from: Nikon D5 Fast Start

John Greengo

White Balance

Lesson 22 from: Nikon D5 Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

22. White Balance

Lesson Info

White Balance

White balance, we have a white balance button on the back of the camera, it does the same thing right here, we'll see the same controls with us. The auto, as I mentioned before, has three different options: auto zero, auto one and auto two. And so, auto zero tries to really correct for the colors that it sees, and tries to make everything as white as possible. One leaves a little bit of that warmth in there. And two keeps a fair bit more of the warmth. And I got real curious, cause this is kind of a new feature with Nikon, and so I wanted to run it through a little test. And so I just took it in the studio, I was shooting with some tungsten lights, which are very warm, and I was surprised that the auto zero did not really fully correct for the colors. It definitely did more correction than the auto one or the auto two, but this is gonna be one of those features that you adjust to your own flavoring, seasonings, to your own taste. To what you think looks good. I think auto two is gonna ...

be a bit warm for most people, so I think auto one is gonna be a good choice, or auto zero for a lot of people. You can also go in and tweak any of these different white balances a little bit to one direction or the other. If you didn't like where the incandescent was, and you wanted to give it a little bit more blue, or a little bit more orange tint to it, you can do that by simply using that right arrow. Be aware that any arrows pointing to the right are gonna be options, additional options, on top of that particular feature. So the preset, we did see and do a demo of the live preview of setting the white balance. But we can also do it without live view by simply photographing a white object, like a piece of paper; selecting the preset in the manual; choosing which destination we want it to go to; and then selecting that image that we have already photographed, that is white. We'll click the OK, and we'll basically be setting that white balance to that particular custom setting. So we actually have two different ways of doing it. We saw the preview of the live view way, which is kind of nice and interactive cause you can see on the back of the camera what's going on a little bit better, but in this case you would just shoot an object under the lighting that you want to correct for. Picture control. And so in this case here, the camera, for it's JPEGs, is tweaking all of the images for you. And so there's a little bit of adjustment with sharpness, and contrast, and color saturation that the camera is setting these to. And these are things that you would normally do in Photoshop or some post production. One of the ones, there's actually two of them that are kind of interesting in here. One is monochrome. So if you are shooting a black and white project, and you want to see on the back of the camera what it looks like in black and white, put your camera in monochrome, and you will see on the back of the camera, after you shoot a picture, your picture in black and white. Even if you were shooting it in raw. What happens then is that you will see an image on the back of the camera in black and white. Download it to your computer, you will get a color image, which you can then turn to black and white if you want to. But it's great for previewing out the feel. There's also a flat option, but we're gonna talk about that a little bit more in the video section because there's some people who are shooting video files, that wanna shoot flat. And if you don't know what that means, I got a little video to show you. So, you can go in and manage the control of these picture settings by renaming these, if you want. And so I wanna do a little demo here with you, just to show you. So let me get my camera out, and hop into the menu setting. Jump up to the right tab. And scroll down to Picture Control, and Manage Picture Control here. So, you can either hit the center button, or you can go to the right to navigate through this. And I'm gonna go to save and edit. And I'm just gonna stick with the standard here. And I'm gonna go to the right, so how I went to the right there. And now I can go in, and I can adjust the sharpening. And there's gonna be a little scale here, and if I wanna add sharpness, you know, increase the sharpening of an image, or I wanna reduce it, I can set it here. And I can come down to the clarity, which is very similar to sharpening; I think that's just working with the mid-tones. The overall contrast of the image, the brightness, the saturation, the hue. And I can go up and down, and I can tweak all of these so that my images meet a certain need. Now, normally, in many of my photography classes I would say, "Don't bother with this. Just shoot raw, and fix it later." Well, the fact of the matter is there's a lot of people who shoot with this camera, are gonna be shooting JPEGs. And let's just say you're shooting for your sports team, and you give them all the JPEGs, and they say, "Yeah, we're publishing these JPEGs, and they just seem a little oversaturated." Oh, okay, well let me come up here to the saturation, and let me bump the saturation down a couple of notches, and see if those JPEGs meet your needs a little bit better, without you having to go in and adjust them on every, single photograph. And, so there's a variety of reasons why you might want to do this, but for anyone who does shoot JPEGs, if you're not happy with them, you got the full adjustment here. And then, once your in here, you can set OK, and if you want to, you can go in and you can rename this to a certain standard. It might be the group that it's going towards, or a certain arena that works with a certain type of adjustment and custom setting to this. And so, a lot different control you have. If you're shooting raw, all that stuff isn't really that important. It will probably adjust the images on the back of the camera, the way you look at them. But it's not gonna have a final impact on the final raw image because that's the original information from the sensor itself. So that is the picture control and managing it. Color space is the space that you are recording your JPEG images. When you shoot raw you get Adobe RGB, but when you shoot JPEG, you can either get sRGB or Adobe RGB. Adobe is a slightly larger color gamut, allows you a little bit more space to work with, so it's the one I generally recommend.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

NikonĀ® D5 Recommended Settings
NkonĀ® D5 Fast Start Class Slides

Ratings and Reviews

Dave Safley
 

John Greengo does a fantastic job of going over all the great features of this camera. Yes, there is a lot of information, but the format of the class enabled me to drive right into the features I needed for an upcoming shoot. I am new to Creative Live but this class is showing me the fantastic value of this platform. Happy Shooting!

a Creativelive Student
 

Already set the Fn3 button for Voice Memo - easy peasy thanks to this and so many other "buried" ( in the manual ) treasures. Notwithstanding three years with the D4 and one year with the D5, I am substantially more familiar and comfortable with the available tools / features of this amazing camera, Nikon's D5. Thank you, John, for the relaxed, easy-to-follow yet informative, professional instruction - well done!

Michelle Mealing
 

As usual, John Greengo has provided me with a wealth of information, this time to decide on my next Nikon camera purchase. John has a talent for explaining technical aspects in a simply to understand, yet intelligent, language. I feel very lucky to be able to tap into the knowledge of such experts and thank the day I found out about Creative Live. Unfortunately I had to miss a little part of the live broadcast due to international time differences. I will definitely be watching the class again and again (there's so much content). Thanks John and Creative Live. Looking forward to my next class.

Student Work

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