Page 182 - Friedman Archives

182 The “Recording” (Camera icon) Menu Settings

Cloudy – the light in
open shade is kind of
like light on a cloudy
day, but not quite as blue. This
setting adds just a touch of yellow
to the picture to compensate.

Incandescent – another
word for “Tungsten”
(which in turn is another
word for “old fashioned light
bulb”). Incandescent bulbs give
light that is predominantly red-
orange (see Figure 5-38). Setting
the camera to Incandescent mode
lends a compensating bluish cast
to the image.
Fluorescent (Four Figure 5-39: An open-shade portrait
settings) – There used to taking using the Daylight setting (top)
be only one type of and the Shade setting (bottom), which
fluorescent bulb: the long, tubular blindly adds a lot of yellow.
lights that have graced the inside
of office buildings for decades. But in the past few years the Compact
Fluorescent type bulbs (which are designed to be screw-in replacements for
incandescent light bulbs) have become very popular. When they first came
out their color balances were horrid – and the bulb had to stay on for 10
minutes before that color became stable.
CF bulbs today are much improved and have standardized (sort of) on color
balances across manufacturers. And so the first three fluorescent settings
(“Warm White”, “Cool White”, and “Day White”) were designed to
compensate for these CF bulbs, whereas the fourth setting, “Daylight”, was
designed for the old-fashioned long-tube fluorescent light. (In my
experience, the light spectrum from fluorescent lights varies considerably
across manufacturers, and so the pre-set WB settings for fluorescent lights
are never great out of the box. The next section shows how to tweak it, but
read ahead to the “Custom WB” function for a faster and more precise
method of correcting the color balance.)

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