academy | Colour
The colour survival kit These essential tools help you measure, match and manipulate light, nail exposure and be even more creative
reat colour isn’t something you can fix in post or leave until the grade. From getting white-balance and exposure
right to understanding exactly what your lights are producing, a few simple tools can give you control over colour before you even press record. Colour should be an essential part of your workflow on-set, not a last-minute fix. On any shoot, you have to set white-balance properly, monitor exposure carefully and manage mixed light sources before they become a problem. That’s just a starting point for accurate colour and natural- looking skin tones. Really understanding the colour and intensity of the light in your shots lets you go much further. Once you know exactly what you are working with, you can start manipulating it deliberately to create a look or mood that makes your films stand apart. The basics are white-balance and exposure. However sophisticated your post-production software, correcting mismatched white-balance or badly exposed footage after a shoot is slower and potentially more destructive than getting things right at capture. Yet plenty of filmmakers still rely on auto white-balance, choose generic in-camera presets such as Daylight or Tungsten, or simply trust the CCT figure displayed on the back of their LED. Set white-balance manually whenever you can. On some mirrorless cameras the function might be buried in a menu, but it’s worth learning how to access it quickly. Even when shooting Raw, where white- balance can be altered non-destructively later, getting it right on-set gives you more representative monitoring and reduces the potential for mistakes when using codecs where colour information is baked more firmly into the recorded image.
Don’t trust your shirt The traditional shortcut is to grab a plain white sheet of paper – or use somebody’s white shirt – then fill the frame and take a custom white-balance reading. This might be somewhat better than guessing, but it isn’t particularly accurate. Paper can contain optical brighteners and pigments, while a bright white target can potentially clip, compromising the RGB information the camera uses to calculate its balance. A dedicated video white-balance target is a much better solution. These are engineered to provide a spectrally neutral reference while avoiding unwanted reflections. Some will incorporate colour patches too, so recording a few seconds of the chart gives you a valuable reference Block party A simple cube with white, black and grey targets is an easy way to set white-balance
for matching and correcting footage later. Options include the Calibrite Colorchecker Passport Video 2, which combines colour and greyscale targets in a compact folding case. The Datacolor Spyder Photo Video Kit takes the concept further. Alongside the Spyder Pro monitor calibrator, there is a Spyder Cube for white-balance and contrast reference, plus the Spyder Checkr Video chart, designed to help standardise colour between cameras and lenses. But getting the camera neutral is only half the battle.
The confidence to match light sources or make them different to create mood
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September/October 2026
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