DIY White/Color Balance with Warm Cards

I'm a film/television/visual arts student. One of the most important steps to good production as a cameraman/photographer is to make sure you have proper white balance to record accurate colors. You can stylize the color tones in editing. This is also important for photography (but if you shoot in a RAW format, you may not need to worry about this- still a good practice).

I'm not going to get into the idea white balance much. You can do a web search- Cambridge in Color has a great article on white balance, and Ken Stone discussed it on his blog  in 2006.

Remember, color is an art form. There is no mathematical right/wrong to style. It is all perception and taste. Only so much adjustment can be done in editing, so depending on your purpose, it may make sense to adjust your color temperature while shooting to better capture warm or cool colors. Depending on your preferences, warm cards could be great tools to save you time when adjusting colors.

Are the colors arbitrary? There is no IEEE level of professional standardization, from what I gather. You can use whatever you want, but there is general consensus to warm card colors. You can buy a $70 set, but I'm a fan of DIY (Do It Yourself) whenever possible. You can print your own warm cards. The difference, as with anything, is quality of product- but remember, the look of your shot is all that matters, and that is your (or the producer's/client's) stylistic preference.

If I had a set of professional warm cards, I probably would photograph them and develop color swatches from them... but I don't. I couldn't easily find information about warm card color swatches, but persistence wins the day.

Here are the color swatch settings I've found:

• Warm 1 - C/15 M/2 K/5
• Warm 2 -- C/20 M10 K10
• 1/2 Warm - C/7 M/1 K/2
• Minus Green - C/10 Y/10 K/2
• 1/2 Minus Green - C/5 Y/5 K/1
• Gray 128 - C/52 M/43 Y/43 K/8
• Gray 117 or 18% - C/55 M/47 Y/46 K/12
• Kodak 169 Gray - C/39 M/33 Y/19

You can use an image editing program like GIMP to create large or small cards for printing. Just keep in mind the color accuracy of your home printer. You should print on something that light won't leak through. Use card stock- and maybe even back the card stock print with another sheet of card stock. You could go to Staples or FedEx Office (formerly Kinkos) to print-- do not opt for lamination, you need a matte surface to avoid glare. I keep mine in a pouch to avoid color fading from light, but I can always print more.

I should say though that for peace of mind, I had purchased a white card. I recently replace it with an 18% grey card. You don't need to white balance off of white, just a color you know to be neutral on the color spectrum. Why grey? Sometimes it's hard to control overexposure of white depending on how strong the lighting is. If the card is overexposed, you can't white balance off it.