3. Color balance indoors
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When filming indoors, it is often best to match your key light’s color temperature to the ambient light in the room. Once you do, set your camera’s white balance to the corresponding temperature to capture it accurately.
For example, if the ambient light in the room is coming from warm lamps and overhead lights, use a key light that is also tungsten balanced (very warm) and set your camera’s white balance to 3200 Kelvin.
4. Color balance outdoors
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When filming outdoors, the sun will always be the ambient light you have to work with. The sun is naturally very cool in temperature at 3200 Kelvin, and your camera’s white balance must be set to 5600 Kelvin for accurate color. If the sun is not your key light, your key light should be set to a cool temperature of 3200 Kelvin to match the sun.
One extra consideration when filming outdoors is what to do when filming in the shade. Shade is naturally even cooler temperature than sunlight and some of the coolest light you will encounter. If it is an overcast day, the ambient light can read 2000 Kelvin or even cooler.
If you are shooting in the shade without adding your own artificial light source, you will need to set your camera’s white balance to 7000 Kelvin as a starting point. You can also use a gray card for a more accurate white balance setting, especially in extreme cases like this.
Let’s say you are adding a key light on an overcast day or while working in a shaded environment. In these cases, it is best to use a daylight-balanced light source (3200 Kelvin). Then, set your camera’s white balance to 5600 Kelvin to read your subject’s color properly. The ambient light will naturally appear cooler, but you will notice how naturally appealing it is to see shade as cooler than your key light.
5. Contrasting color temperature
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In some indoor interview lighting situations, there will be fluorescent bulbs creating the ambient light. Fluorescent bulbs fall somewhere in the middle reading at roughly 4000-4500 Kelvin and cast a bit of a green tint. This combination of reading level and tint makes them very hard to work with when setting up interview lighting.
When dealing with these odd-colored lights, it is best to turn them off, then re-light the scene with your own sources. If you can’t turn the lights off for one reason or another, you can use it to your advantage to create extra color contrast by mixing color temperatures.
To achieve aesthetically pleasing color contrast, always keep your subject’s light warmer than the ambient light, and set your white balance to accurately read your key light.
If you have extra time to experiment, intentionally mix color temperatures for deeper color contrast in your image. Setting your key light to be tungsten-balanced, but using a cooler daylight-balanced source for your environment is a great start. From there, you can experiment with what looks good to you.
Here are five easy portrait lighting setups. Learn ’em, use ’em, master ’em.
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