As a photographer, I am always looking for ways to improve my art, whether it is creating more visually appealing composition, learning how to nail my ring shots, or understanding how to set my camera so I can capture images as close to perfect in camera as possible. Something that I recently discovered over the past few months is Kelvin. This is one of the best ways to manually control the white balance in your camera. Here a few reasons why I LOVE it!

1. Sometimes the auto white balance settings just don’t cut it!The “shade” setting always seemed too warm!
2. I don’t use a gray card or an expo disk to set my exposure, so I wanted a better way to control the colors so that I have close-to-perfect white balance in-camera.
3. I wanted to cut down on my post-processing time and spend less time editing behind a computer! Because we all know how time consuming that can be!

There are certain lighting situations that are so complex that you just need to manually tweak the white balance in your camera to get it just right. By getting the white balance just perfect in-camera, you are able to avoid making those adjustments in post-processing. In my opinion, I always think less post-processing is best!

In case you still aren’t quite sure what I’m talking about, Kelvin is a measurement of temperature. Photographers use the Kelvin scale to control the color and temperature (yellow or blue) of their images. If you edit your images in Lightroom, Kelvin allows you to control the yellow/blue slider in-camera. The temperature scale ranges from 2000-10,000. The warmer the light the lower the kelvin number you want to set your camera. For example,

Photo Credit: Ona Hau Photography

Here are a few things to keep in mind as you try out Kelvin:

1. Practice makes perfect! Make sure you practice on a session or two before using Kelvin on a wedding.
2. Learn the scale! Remember that lower numbers means that the image will be cooler.
3.Shoot in RAW! I ALWAYS shoot in raw because there is so much more data captured in the image, so it’s easier to correct mistakes (like setting your kelvin to the wrong end of the scale!).

Well, I hope this post was helpful for you! I used to always think that Kelvin was too complicated for me, so I never actually tried it. Now it’s almost all I ever use! If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Happy snapping!

With joy,
Kelsie