# White Balance Help



## crokett (Feb 28, 2013)

I have a point and shoot camera.  My 'light box' is a cardboard box lined with white posterboard and it has holes cut in the sides and top with white fabric across them. I need help with white balance on this photo.

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-...AAABBc/H_z7Ml8_VG8/s999/euro_white_copper.JPG

when I adjust the white balance in GIMP, because the blank is already white it washes it out and you can't see the figure.  Should I re-shoot with different bulbs?  Would the white balance setting on the camera help?


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## JohnGreco (Feb 28, 2013)

Reshoot on a different color background, maybe gray. But if you want the white backdrop to be white, the pen will be, too.


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## Haynie (Feb 28, 2013)

Yep.  Different back ground.


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## Sylvanite (Feb 28, 2013)

I agree.  There's very little contrast between the pen blank and the background color.  Your best bet would be to reshoot with a different background.

This is about as good as I could get in a few minutes with Photoshop:






Regards,
Eric


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## Boz (Feb 28, 2013)

What kind of lights are you using?  Looking at your original photo it looks like incandescent.  The human eye sees between 400 and 700 nanometers of light.  Below that is infrared and above that in ultraviolet.  Daylight is 550 and incandescent is 320 to 350 nanometers and is much warmer.  If your camera has an incandescent setting try that.  Some cameras have a function where you put a white piece of paper in front of the camera under the lighting conditions you are using and the camera will balance.  Our eyes automatically adjust.  Put on a pair of yellow lenses and then take them off.  For a few minutes everything will look blue (the opposite color of yellow) then our eyes adjust and everything looks normal again.


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## crokett (Feb 28, 2013)

The bulb is incandescent.  Should I switch to daylight or flourescent?  I will aso try reshooting on a different background.


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## alphageek (Feb 28, 2013)

crokett said:


> The bulb is incandescent.  Should I switch to daylight or flourescent?  I will aso try reshooting on a different background.



I would avoid fluorescent.  Any other one is fine if you can get the white balance to match it.   If you don't have a setting custom white balance, then you should try to match color tone to you camera if you can.  (knowing the model camera would help to give a better answer).


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## plantman (Feb 28, 2013)

Daylite bulbs will give you the whitest light, but for a white pen, I would change the background color, put the pen on a mirror, or check to see if you have a macro setting on your camera. Jim S


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## crokett (Feb 28, 2013)

My camera is a Kodak M590.  It does have a white balance setting.  I am going to have to learn how to use it.


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## alphageek (Mar 1, 2013)

crokett said:


> My camera is a Kodak M590.  It does have a white balance setting.  I am going to have to learn how to use it.



I looked it up.  You have white ballance, but no custom white ballance.  Just a couple of settings (auto,daylight,etc).   Since the auto isn't doing so hot, you might want to consider daylight bulbs or it will have to be in post processing to get it right.


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## TexasTaxi (Mar 1, 2013)

JohnGreco said:


> Reshoot on a different color background, maybe gray. But if you want the white backdrop to be white, the pen will be, too.


 
I recently bought a Polaroid portable studio, just to take pictures of my pens and I ran into the same problem when using the white backdrop. No matter how much lighting I used, the pictures always seemed bad. I switched to black and the pictures were incredible (by my standards, anyway).


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## crokett (Mar 1, 2013)

hmm. I will try a black background and see what that does.  I am sitting in my office eyeing a black t-shirt I got from a vendor that I will never wear.


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## 76winger (Mar 1, 2013)

I did a lot this experimentation a couple years ago. If your interested, you can check out what I went through here: http://www.penturners.org/forum/f24/photo-booth-shakedown-opintions-welcomed-74186/

Maybe something in there will help you.


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## crokett (Mar 1, 2013)

thanks that does help.  After some more reading today I am going to do a better light box and use some halogen lamps to light it.  hopefully that will help.  I also need a way to change out the background color. I have a white and copper pen that white is the wrong background for it.


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