Color Temperature and the
Kelvin Scale
Early
all over my personal facebook page and business page, I ranted about open shade
and the fact that uneducated photographers are still belting out blue cast
images with out decent catch lights.
I
decided to take a stand!
We
have to understand color temperatures in order to know how certain lighting
situation affects our images. Color represents many things. It sets tone to our
images and sparks emotions.
I
did post about understanding color in the emotional sense more than the Kelvin
scale. You can find this section here.
What
is color temperature and this thing called the Kelvin Scale?
Color
temperature is the characteristic of visible light to the eye measured in the
Kelvin Scale. Kelvin is the measurement put into place by William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, Lord
Kelvin is widely known for realizing that there was a lower limit to
temperature, absolute zero; absolute temperatures are stated in
units of Kelvin
in his honor.
Let’s move on for we are studying light temperature for
photography only.
But let’s do look at the scale. Visual aids help me
tremendously.
The
scale shows us warm to cool color temperatures giving the examples. Candles to
blue skies.
You
can see electronic flash is warmer than daylight overcast. Applying warming
anything, filters, flash and reflectors warms the scene back up taking off blue
casted white dresses and skin tones.
You
can also adjust your white balance setting in your camera to help.
White Balance
Our
eyes have the ability to pick up color more than our cameras do, but there are
presets in your camera that allow you to pick what balance you are needing in
general.
These
seem familiar? It should because it you can find this menu on your camera.
You
see the options for AWB-auto white balance, custom and Kelvin, tungsten,
florescent, daylight flash, cloudy and shade.
The
camera is saying that you can custom to create your WB or Use the Kelvin scale
to pick the balance.
The
other presents are variations of what you can do in custom and using the Kelvin
scale.
For
instance, if you pick tungsten, your images will come out with hues of yellow
orange. Tungsten represents your scale color 1,700 to 3,700 K temperatures.
Yes
you could learn how to custom balance each camera if that is what you want.
This tutorial is to help you with the tools you already have, the tools that
the manufacture made with your camera to make it easier. It’s why we have run
to digital and left behind most film cameras. When you bought your camera you
paid for all the options. Isn’t it best to know what everything did? Why not?
You have them.
Understanding
color temperature helps us improve our overall colors and understanding presets
helps you learn even more. I truly believe teaching this way helps you do a lot
of things. It helps you learn your menus and makes navigation a breeze. Most of
the time I hear that “I learn better hands on” I learn better that way as well.
The more you navigate through your camera’s menus and functions the more you
continue to learn where things are, how to get to it. Learning photography
isn’t easy.
Photography-
Photo-
derives from a Greek word (phos) meaning light, Graphe’ meaning drawing of
lines, there for the entire word means “drawing with light. You should always
be studying what you do not know or studying on how to improve what you know.
Here
are examples when I took my camera, at the time having preset of cloudy and
using a gold and silver reflector.
You
will see that adding/reflecting the light added warm colors to my photo even
though my white balance was preset to cloudy. The presets help but when you
push your subject into open shade you HAVE TO FIGHT the BLUE CAST!
First Photo with cloudy white balance setting with no flash or any use of relfection in light. Second photo is silver reflection and the third is gold reflector.
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