Contents

1. Introduction
2. Color picker
3. Auto white balance
4. Color chart
5. Adjusting white balance manually
6. Alternative approaches
7. Reference

Introduction

All videographers at some point face the challenge of dealing with skewed or incorrect white balance. As you look through the footage the question inevitably becomes: how can I bring everything in-line? Fortunately, Color Finale 2 Pro offers multiple tools to assist you in analysing and setting the right white balance.

It’s worth noting that sometimes incorrectly shot footage can be prohibitively difficult to correct in post-production. Additionally, a color temperature on either extreme end can be considered normal due to the external shooting conditions and so may only need minimal adjustments if you’re aiming to reproduce that natural look.

But in this post you’ll see how you can take a clip and give it a neutral white balance.

When thinking about white balance, we tend to think about the color temperature and color tint parameters. There are at least four ways to go on about changing these parameters from Color Finale 2 Pro’s inspector: with the color picker, the auto button, using the color chart tools if there’s one in the shot, or manual adjustment using the Temperatue and Tint sliders. You can also set white balance by using tools such as Color Wheels in the layers panel.

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White balance via the color picker

Note: before using Color Finale 2, make sure you have the plugin selected so that there is yellow border around it in the inspector.

First let’s use the color picker. If we click on the picker and hover the cursor over the viewer we can see the pixel readout information of the underlying image. By hovering over an area that we know should be white or gray, we can get a more accurate idea to what extent there is a color temperature bias. In the end the red, green and blue values of this area that we know to be white or gray should be lined up.

Once the cursor is over a known neutral white or gray point in the image, click on it. The white balance instantly changed in the clip. With the help of a video scope set to overlay mode we can see if the white balance is correct by checking that white pixels in the image are showing as white pixel values in the scope.

If you want to view the RGB channels individually you can change the scopes mode from overlay to parade. Just as with overlay, we can now tell if any area that should be neutral or gray is white balanced: the peaks of the red, green, and blue values for those pixels should be in alignment with each other. Use the color picker for clips with highly saturated colors to achieve a more accurate result.

Auto white balance

Now let's look at the auto button. The auto tool works in a similar way to how a digital camera calculates auto white balance. It examines the pixels’ statistical distribution information for the given frame and calculates white balance compensation needed for the image based on this information.

Avoid using auto with images that are predominantly monochromatic or that have a dominant, highly saturated color. For additional help in understanding whether an image needs white balancing there is the image analysis tool.

Often it can be distracting trying to see whether your RGB values are balanced in-line on the scopes due to an abundance of information. Using this tool together with the video scopes allows you to mask and evaluate only the areas you're interested in. The scopes will not reflect information outside of the selected area.

Color chart

Let's look at using the chart. Using a gray card or a color chart appropriately within the frame provides an ideal target area from which to set exposure and white balance. Select the appropriate chart from the inspector, add points to the image, working clockwise, press match chart and Color Finale 2 Pro does the rest. To see the before and after, toggle the match enabled button to bypass the result.

Manual white balance

You can always balance the image manually. Manual white balancing clips is simply a case of adjusting the temperature and tint parameters’ sliders in the inspector.

To help us evaluate the changes in the color channels we have set the scopes to overlay — they'll be overlayed each other and appear white on the graph. The standard way of setting white balance manually is to use the temperature slider first to balance the red and the blue channels. Then the tint slider to adjust between magenta and green.

Alternatives

There’s a lot of flexibility in how you can approach color correction. So regardless of standard approaches you can also balance the shot by using Color Wheels in its sliders mode. Simply increase or decrease the highlight and midtone values to find the right balance. As with the other techniques, using scopes so you can evaluate the values is a must if you want to get more accurate, repeatable results.

In Conclusion

Hopefully you found this post helpful and feel ready to white balance your own footage using Color Finale 2. This post is based off of our video on YouTube. Consider subscribing to our YouTube channel for more tutorials like this and more.

Reference

Color Finale Easy Reference Guide — White Balance