Sound familiar? See my post above.

Matching film type to light source has always been one of the most crucial challenges for photographers. Professional photographers use color temperature meters, costing about $1000.00 to be able to accurately gauge color. Then they either filter their lights or place filters in front of the lenses.

With the advent of digital photography it has become far easier. You can place a neutral photo gray card in your scene and move forward until it fills your viewfinder and take a custom light balance reading. Be careful to not cast a shadow on the gray card. That's the purpose of the "custom" setting. Check your manual for the specifics. You can also use a white board but the results may not be as dependable due to the differences in whites.

My Nikon D70 allows me to take a photo with a gray card placed in the scene and adjust the color temperature in the Nikon Capture software when I download the image to my MAC. I can then upload the corrected image to my camera and use this image to set my white balance. It allows me to have virtually perfect color.

I have been doing a lot of testing with the camera and just feel I'm beginning getting the hang of things. I'm also able to load custom photoshop type curves into the camera. Having these adjustments squared away before the moment of capture gives me better quality pictures with no data loss.

White balance
 

Yes Marvin, that does look familiar. The difference is that you know what you're talking about and I just parrot what the photographer said this morning. Had this question come up a week from now I probably would have forgotton that I even heard 'white balance'. Luckily this has come up now while it's fresh in my head. There is so much to learn, things disappear as new info comes in.

My camera manual has 2 pages on setting the white balance. Who knew?

There's a page on 'setting a custom white balance' and it talks about that 'photo-quality gray card' you mentioned. I'm assuming that's a special gray card that I can find at a photography shop. Or maybe it's any gray card that I will use to match?

Perhaps this will help with the discrepancy I had when shooting my 'babysitter portraits'. I even started a thread asking anyone why my color might have been so far off given the conditions. I can't wait to start experimenting with the white balance.

Thanks for the info Marvin on the white balance.

Joan

White Balance
 

Thank you so much Marvin, for mentioning with more specifics on how to use "custom balance".

My manual talks about it using a white cardstock. No mention was made whatsoever of using the gray card, which I've used successfully for film shoots, but didn't know how to use for digital.