PerroneFord
Contributor
So here is a question to some of you more advanced shooters.
Why do we insist on white balance? What purpose does it serve?
As closely as I can tell, the main purpose of white balancing a video camera is to prevent the camera from over saturating and clipping any particular color channel. Since we are most likely to lose reds first when underwater, that is NOT the channel we'd be most likely to clip. Likely it would be blue. And in rare cases, maybe green.
So, knowing this, if we could somehow shift our cameras so that the blue sensors somehow were less sensitive, or registered colors less prominently, we might be able to get away with not white balancing the camera at all. This is NOT to say the image would be "accurate" when we got back to the edit bay, but we'd have preserved all information in each color channel even if it was not in the correct proportion.
My camera, like many others, has a chroma phase which does this very thing. I am able to shift my camera from under saturating reds, to under saturating blue. In general, I set my camera to under saturate all colors. I purposely try to get a nearly pastel soft image out of my camera. This tends to keep my blacks more noise free, even in lower light, it tends to keep me from clipping whites, and I have a very "flat" image that I can manipulate in many ways. Shifting color in camera seems a natural extension of this idea.
Have any of you tried this underwater? Or would any of you be WILLING to give it a shot to see what you come back with? I am somewhat limited in that my camera for underwater shooting does not have these adjustments. Only my topside camera does. I am really curious as to how this might work.
-P
Why do we insist on white balance? What purpose does it serve?
As closely as I can tell, the main purpose of white balancing a video camera is to prevent the camera from over saturating and clipping any particular color channel. Since we are most likely to lose reds first when underwater, that is NOT the channel we'd be most likely to clip. Likely it would be blue. And in rare cases, maybe green.
So, knowing this, if we could somehow shift our cameras so that the blue sensors somehow were less sensitive, or registered colors less prominently, we might be able to get away with not white balancing the camera at all. This is NOT to say the image would be "accurate" when we got back to the edit bay, but we'd have preserved all information in each color channel even if it was not in the correct proportion.
My camera, like many others, has a chroma phase which does this very thing. I am able to shift my camera from under saturating reds, to under saturating blue. In general, I set my camera to under saturate all colors. I purposely try to get a nearly pastel soft image out of my camera. This tends to keep my blacks more noise free, even in lower light, it tends to keep me from clipping whites, and I have a very "flat" image that I can manipulate in many ways. Shifting color in camera seems a natural extension of this idea.
Have any of you tried this underwater? Or would any of you be WILLING to give it a shot to see what you come back with? I am somewhat limited in that my camera for underwater shooting does not have these adjustments. Only my topside camera does. I am really curious as to how this might work.
-P