By Billy Teo, a freelance writer

PLAY back any amateur wedding video and you may see that the bride does not look radiant in white.

In fact, she may look jaundiced while her gown looks dowdy.

Blame the lighting in the wedding banquet hall and also the camcorder's inability to adjust its colour circuits effectively to reduce the colour cast on the gown, rendering it yellowish.

Which is why roses are not always red and violets not always blue.

Colours in a video clip depend on the light source: harsh sunlight, tungsten lamps, fluorescent tubes or combinations of these give off a certain colour cast or tint, depending on the light source's colour temperature.

Sunlight at noon is considered neutral, an overcast day is cool (giving bluish tints) whereas tungsten lamps and candlelight are warm (giving yellowish tints).

Get your hue right

Shoot under a tungsten light or by candlelight without adjusting the White Balance and your footage will appear reddish or have an orange cast.

Shoot a plate of chicken rice under a cloudy sky and the 'cold' bluish overcast will make the dish appear blue.

The camcorder's Automatic White Balance or AWB mode will do its best to make colours look natural, but may be overwhelmed by extremely warm or cold light sources.

You can tell the colour cast in your scene only when you look at the LCD preview screen of the camcorder and not with the naked eye.

Warm up and cool down

Thankfully, you can adjust the white balance settings to get natural-looking colours - either manually or by using programmed settings.

The premise is that if the white looks pristinely white, then every other colour will look true too.

Ergo, no bluish chicken rice.

So, check the pre-set white balance modes that allow your camcorder to adapt to different colour temperatures.

Go to the onscreen menu and scroll to the White Balance or WB section.

Scroll to Cloudy during a cloudy day outdoors for instance, or turn on Fluorescent when shooting in an office.

The camcorder will "warm up" the colours to get the right shade of white no matter where you shoot.

You can also deliberately set the wrong White Balance setting because you want a certain colour cast to evoke a mood or ambience.

Turn on the Tungsten white balance mode when outdoors and the camcorder will "cool down" the colours for a bluish tint that evokes a wintry feel.

Finally, experiment to enhance the cinematography of your home movies. For instance, turn the White Balance to Cloudy to get warmer colours, even when you are indoors.

Get whiter whites manually

TWEAK manually whenever the colours come out wrong. Have a white sheet of paper or card handy.

Turn the camcorder's menu to the White Balance setting and select the Manual or Set White Balance option (depending on the camcorder).

However, do not activate it yet. Next, aim the camcorder at the piece of paper and zoom in until the paper fills the LCD preview screen.

Press the correct White Balance button or icon for a few seconds, to get the camera to recognise the whiteness under the light source.

It will then fine-tune the camcorder's colours to be as neutral as possible, so that white is what it should be.

Repeat this whenever you change your shooting location - say, from indoors to the outdoors - so that the colours stay consistent throughout.

This is part four of a 10-part series on video recording basics.

This story was first published in The Straits Times Digital Life.

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