Fine Tuning (+3 to
Manual, Custom or Preset (sometimes a symbol with a dot and two triangles): This allows you to point the camera at something you want to be neutral and it makes it that way. Read the manual to your camera for specifics. Usually the camera sets itself to what's in front of you. Some cameras also can set themselves to something in an image shot previously. TRICK: Set it pointed at something colored or through a colored filter and your resulting photos will have a color cast opposite the color to which you set it! Set it on something blue and photos come out yellow, set it on something purple and the photos come out green. Point it at something warm and you get cool and vice versa. You even can buy specially tinted "white" cards for this and see examples here.
You use this setting if you have some weird light that otherwise you can't get to look good. I rarely use it, since auto does almost the same thing and makes it much easier.
MORE TIPS:Indoor SportsWhen shooting under fluorescent or mercury lighting the color of the light may actually change hundreds of times a second as the AC power cycles. This is no problem with long exposures. On the other hand shooting indoor sports this drove me completely insane until I figured this out. I was shooting at ISO 3,200 and 1/500 of a second. Exposures and color were very different from frame to frame and I had no idea why until I realized that the lights by design were flickering 120 times a second from the 60 Hz power. There is no way around this other than to retrofit the arena with high frequency ballasts for all the lights or otherwise replace or overpower the arena's lighting. We use high frequency ballasts for our HMI lights in Hollywood so we don't get beats with the 24FPS film cameras, but its expensive and not done in stadiums. Good luck!
Flash IndoorsWhat setting do you use for fill flash under tungsten light? If you use AUTO or Flash you'll get orange backgrounds and normal subjects, and this is pretty good. If you are shooting under fluorescents you'll get a nasty green background with normal looking subjects, not good.
If you change the white balance to tungsten or Fluorescent the backgrounds will look normal, but now the fill light on the subject will look blue or purple. Not good.
Here's the trick from Hollywood: you need to gel (filter) the flash to match the ambient light and then set the white balance for that ambient light. Now everything will look normal. You could gel all the ambient light to match the flash instead, but that's a lot more work since there's a lot more lights. In Hollywood movies we'll spend a day gelling all the different
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