Today we are bringing you a super quick fix to a video content recording problem that small business owners often encounter. I’m so excited to fix it for you and show you how to lock white balance but let me start by telling you a little story as to how we figured this out.
The other day my very frustrated older sister called me! She is a social media manager extraordinaire for small businesses. She was trying to make an instagram reel for a jewelry business she works with and she was frustrated about the color temperature of the video. The simplest way to describe color temperature is essentially how warm or cool the light and therefor color in a photos looks. Your camera has a “white balance” setting where (on phones) it tries to automatically identify the neutral in the image to base the rest of the color temperature off of. If you yourself are a small business owner or someone who creates content for a small business that has products you have GOT to read this blog post.
The problem with auto white balance in video
So Kelsie calls me, and she’s recording a video of jewelry on a pink background. Shehe tells me, “Megan every time I put my hand in the frame it’s the correct color and then when I move my hand and go to record the video all the coloring goes really cool and blue colored and it’s not showing the jewelry off in the right way.” Now if you are a small business owner you know how important it is to accurately represent your products online right. She’s frustrated and she says, “please just tell me what I need to do to fix this because I wanna get this video done for these people!”
I’m gonna show you exactly what I did to fix the problem and how you can use this when you are recording content in the future. If you’re not a big reader and would rather watch it in video form below is an embedded video from our Instagram channel if you prefer it that way. It’s pretty simple and made a HUGE difference!
How to lock white balance and stop your camera from changing the color of the video
So what you’re gonna do is open your settings, find camera, then select record video. If you scroll all the way down to the bottom you will see something that says lock white balance. You’re going to want to turn that on and here’s what it does. With this setting on now as soon as you start a video your camera will no longer continuously monitor the light to adjust the white balance. If you change your lighting and are now in a warmer or cooler light in a different part of your video your camera is NOT going to try to adjust automatically to make the colors look accurate. You are telling it this is the correct white balance, record this way. Your color is going to stay the same the whole video.
It’s great for these situations l but I would probably turn it back off again if I was new I was gonna be recording any videos where there’s shifting light or different like situations in one recording.
Looking for more help with your small business photography?
For more photography help I’d love for you to check out the following posts below. Interested in learning how to master your “real” camera? Consider signing up for our signature photography course Manual Mode for Moms.
