Understanding White Balance

Written by Ken Henderson


Understanding White Balance

The Color of Light

Everyone has taken at least one photograph that has been way off in color. You get it back from whoever processed it, or if it is from a digital camera you load it into your computer, and your immediate response is “whatrepparttar heck happened?”. Everything has a weird color cast to it, either orange, green or blue.

Light has a definite color to it depending onrepparttar 136617 light source and it’s surrounding conditions. As humans we don’t recognizerepparttar 136618 changes inrepparttar 136619 color of light, forrepparttar 136620 most part, because our brains adjust for it.

The color of light is measured in degree’s Kelvin. This is referred to as color temperature. The lowerrepparttar 136621 color temperature,repparttar 136622 redderrepparttar 136623 light is. The higherrepparttar 136624 temperature,repparttar 136625 bluerrepparttar 136626 light is.

Let’s look at sunlight. Throughoutrepparttar 136627 dayrepparttar 136628 color temperature of sunlight changes because of it’s angle andrepparttar 136629 surrounding atmospheric conditions. Early inrepparttar 136630 morning and late inrepparttar 136631 evening sunlight gets a warm golden glow to it. Photographers refer to this time asrepparttar 136632 golden hour. Duringrepparttar 136633 middle ofrepparttar 136634 day howeverrepparttar 136635 light is very blue, around 5500-6500 degrees kelvin. This isrepparttar 136636 color temperature of most flash units. Inrepparttar 136637 shade,repparttar 136638 color temperature of light is around 7500 degrees kelvin.

Artificial light onrepparttar 136639 other hand is a whole different ball game. Let’s take a look at incandescent light bulbs. These are every day light bulbs. On averagerepparttar 136640 color temperature of a light bulb is around 3200 degrees kelvin. They have a strong orange color cast. This is evident if you are outside, late inrepparttar 136641 evening and look atrepparttar 136642 windows of a lit up house. The light inrepparttar 136643 windows will have an orange cast that is very easy to see. It used to be that florescent lights were at about 4000 degrees kelvin. This color temperature would record with a green cast on daylight balanced film. These days florescent lights can be purchased at different color temperatures.

The Recording Media and Corrective Options

Because ofrepparttar 136644 way light can shift color a white object may not record as white on different recording media. As far as this article is concerned, there are two types of light recording media. One is photographic film andrepparttar 136645 other is a digital camera. Let’s look at film first.

The Basics of Home Audio Speakers

Written by Ross MacIver


There are great many home audio speakers onrepparttar market today ranging in price from a few dollars to thousands of dollars. Buying a set of speakers can be a confusing endeavor, but with a little bit of knowledge you should be able to make a wise choice.

Most home audio speakers are made up of several components in one enclosure. The simplest speaker is simply one speaker driver housed in a box with no other electronics involved. These speakers will not sound very good becauserepparttar 136504 single speaker driver is not capable of reproducingrepparttar 136505 entire frequency range.

To provide better sound over a wider frequency range, several speaker components are combined together to make home audio speakers. The low frequencies are reproduced byrepparttar 136506 woofer andrepparttar 136507 high frequencies are reproduced byrepparttar 136508 tweeter. There is a crossover housed inrepparttar 136509 speaker enclosure which dividesrepparttar 136510 audio frequency into highs and lows and sends it torepparttar 136511 appropriate driver.

Some home audio speakers may have a third or even fourth speaker driver installed inrepparttar 136512 enclosure. The most common of these is for reproducing midrange frequencies, and is used inrepparttar 136513 so-called three-way speaker.

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