White Balancing Tungsten to Daylight

[Ashley Barron]

Hello,

I'm to be working on a last minute experimental shoot, with access to 3 red heads. The director wants daylight color temp, for which I know we would require 1/2 or 1/4 CTBs to be put onto the reds. At the moment we don't know if we can get the gels, and my director posed me the question 'can we just white balance to make it look cold and daylight'. My initial answer was no, but then I got curious to find out if that is possible. White balancing to Tungsten lights to achieve a daylight color temp. Don't think that's possible, considering white balancing is just telling the camera to read certain colors as white..but thought I'd pose the question anyway.

Would be great to hear any opinions!!

[Jonathan Bowerbank]

Yes it can be done

 

Place a 1/2 or 1/4 CTO gel on the lights then do a white balance, remove the gels and your light will then appear "daylight" blue in camera without any light loss due to gelling the lights.

[John Holland]

Is that right ? sounds strange to me but happy to be convinced .

[Jonathan Bowerbank]

Don't know what's so strange about it, it makes perfect sense and is done quite often.

 

Did a search for an example, and this is a good one:

 

http://michael-morlan.net/pages/learning/l...ith_cc_gels.htm

[e gustavo petersen]

If you're using a video camera you could use "white balance" to achieve the same color effect as Jonathan describes (which is a correct method).

 

One way is to white balance to an orange colored piece of paper. I've done this by printing colored swatches in various shades (usually five) of orange on to matte photo paper. White balance with an orange card till you find the amount of blue you're interested in.

 

The other method is to place a sheet (or sheets) of CTO over a white card and white balance to that. In both cases, the camera will try to correct for the warm orange color and moves the settings toward the cool blue.

 

If you're shooting on film, you can shoot a few seconds using either the color paper or white paper with CTO and time out the orange will give you the blue cast in your image.

 

You can also, if you're video camera offers it, change the internal menu settings and color your image that way.

[Jonathan Bowerbank]

If you're shooting on film, you can shoot a few seconds using either the color paper or white paper with CTO and time out the orange will give you the blue cast in your image.

 

With film, you can also shoot a grey card with an 85 or 80 filter, depending on which direction you wanna go.

[Ashley Barron]

Thanks guys, muchly appreciated! I'll give it a go :-)

[Stuart Brereton]

Place a 1/2 or 1/4 CTO gel on the lights then do a white balance, remove the gels and your light will then appear "daylight" blue in camera without any light loss due to gelling the lights.

 

This would also make real daylight very blue. If you have both tungsten & daylight, then gelling your lamps is the only practical solution

[Matthew Buick]

Wouldn't it be possible to White Balance by pointing the camera in the sky (though not directly at the sun) and just use that?

[Stephen Williams]

Wouldn't it be possible to White Balance by pointing the camera in the sky (though not directly at the sun) and just use that?

 

Hi Matthew,

 

The sky colour is not very consistent where you live, the grey will give you a normal daylight white balance!

 

Stephen

[Jonathan Bowerbank]

Wouldn't it be possible to White Balance by pointing the camera in the sky (though not directly at the sun) and just use that?

 

To achieve what? To get an accurate white balance, you need a white source. White balancing with the sky would probably leave you with an overly warm image...I imagine.