What is the color temperature and white balance of photography?

Lead: Color has always been the biggest knowledge in photography and output industry. Maybe you will ask: Don't you just press the shutter, send the photo to the computer, and press Print to finish it? No. In fact, you want to gain something from this series of actions? What you see is what you get? This truth requires a lot of knowledge. The data of color space and color temperature are arranged below, so that everyone can further understand the importance of color.

Color space is all the set colors that can be expressed within a certain range. The larger the color space, the more colors can be presented. Two common color spaces are sRGB and Adobe RGB, and you can choose one of them when setting the color space. However, many players don't often use the color space setting of the camera because they don't understand it, but there is a great controversy about which color space to choose.

The Principle and Selection of Color Space

RGB is a color space widely used in the fields of output devices and hardware devices. Although its color space is relatively small, it is widely used. When using this color space to share or print photos online in the later stage of photography, the color error will be small.

Adobe RGB can record a wider range of colors, mainly used in the printing field. Professional post-processing is needed to make colors appear better on the screen, which is suitable for professional photographers. The choice of color space should be based on your own photography level and the use of photos. Adobe RGB is not recommended for ordinary players, because it requires high post-processing technology, and it will be counterproductive if it is not used well.

Schematic diagram of working principle of color space

Selection of camera image storage format

raw

It is a data file of the original information of digital photos, but the data that has not been processed by the image processing chip in the camera cannot be called film format. Because of this, RAW file can edit the original information of digital photos at any time, including contrast, color temperature value, exposure compensation, sharpness and so on. Its size is smaller than TIFF file, but it records more information, which is more conducive to retaining the original information of photos.

Joint image expert group

Is the most common image format at present. It uses a distorted image compression method, which affects the image quality, but its volume is much smaller than the original image file. Another advantage of this format is its strong compatibility. It can save memory card space and increase the number of photos that can be taken, which is a good choice for players who don't have high requirements on image quality.

disagree

Is a truly undistorted image format, which can reach 2? 3 times compression, so it can keep the richest colors and layers of the original picture. However, this file format is very large and takes up a lot of hard disk space. Mainly used in printing, publishing and other industries, this format will not cause any loss of details, which is very helpful for large-scale image output of photographic photos. In addition, TIFF files are as universal and compatible as JPEG files.

All kinds of image storage formats have their own advantages and disadvantages, not one format is absolutely excellent and the other is absolutely outdated. Therefore, when choosing a picture storage format, players must comprehensively consider their own shooting habits, photo uses and post-processing capabilities, and choose the most suitable file storage format, so as to get twice the result with half the effort in shooting and post-processing.

Color temperature is actually the temperature of color.

When the temperature of substances in nature is absolutely 0 degrees, their colors are all black. With the increase of temperature, substances will emit different light. In this process, with the increase of temperature, the color of the emitted light will change constantly, and the temperature of the substance is called the color temperature of the light source. Due to different time and weather conditions, light in nature will have different color temperature properties.

Schematic diagram of color temperature change

White balance can correct color deviation

The color temperature of light is different at different times. The human eye can correct and identify the color change, but the photosensitive element of digital camera can't. Therefore, digital cameras need to correct the color deviation caused by light with different color temperatures. This correction process is called white balance.

Color temperature adjustment menu

The basis of adjusting white balance is to identify the type and color temperature of light source. The automatic white balance function of digital SLR camera can accomplish this operation to a certain extent, but the result of automatic white balance is often not accurate enough. Therefore, manually adjusting the white balance is an effective method to obtain the correct color temperature of the image. There are two ways to adjust the white balance: one is to set it according to the weather conditions, such as sunny, rainy and outdoor; Another method is to set the color temperature value of light directly.

While correcting the white balance, players can also try to shoot a color temperature different from the light, because different white balances will bring different color expressions to the photos. The following photo list shows the different effects of photos with different white balance and color temperature.

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