How to use a grey card
Ensuring that your white balance, or the temperature at which your camera records the colour of light, is accurate is important when it comes to creating compelling photo. Portrait subjects with a slight green pallor aren’t that attractive, unless it’s a Hallowe’en shoot!
The image in the centre is correctly colour balanced, while the surrounding images show possible white balance and colour cast issues.
There are any number of shooting situations where the lighting might result in an unpleasant colour cast because the camera was unable to set the ‘correct’ white balance—one in which whites appear white. Mixed artificial lighting is one such occasion.
You can rely on your camera to pick a white balance setting for you, but that won’t always work to your advantage.
This would never happen to your eyes, but your camera can be fooled. In this case, the camera was set to a manual white balance for indoor photography, which is why this image of Norman Jay came out looking very blue.
When the ambient lighting doesn’t neatly fit into one your camera’s white balance presets, such as Tungsten, Fluorescent, Cloudy, and so on, you can set white balance manually, using a grey card.
Grey cards are inexpensive plastic cards available from most camera suppliers. To set a custom or manual white balance, place the card in the same location as where you’re going to be shooting. Fill the frame with the grey card, or use the spot metering setting, and take a photo.
Next navigate to the Set Custom or Manual White Balance command and confirm the image you want to use to set white balance. When you take the next photo in the same location and with the same lighting the camera will now know which tones to set as mid-grey, and all the other colours in the image will be recorded accurately. Easy!
In The Ilex Introduction to Photography, Haje Jan Kamps guides you through the process of turning your everyday snapshots into great pictures that you can be proud of. It doesn’t matter if you shoot with a smartphone or a top-of-the-range dSLR, this book has everything in it that you need to know!
The Ilex Introduction to Photography
Haje Jan Kamps
Buy it now!
RRP for print edition: £14.99
