Tennessee Photography by Bradley Proctor

If you own a Canon XTi (400d), you probably have noticed the lack of a good white balance setting for indoor pictures under artificial light. Set the camera to automatic white balance or tungsten and the picture is too yellowish. Use a gray card (or sheet of paper) to set the white balance, and the picture is unnaturally white. None of the other white balance presets are any help either.

After some experimenting, I found that using my blue jeans as a gray card to set the white balance resulted in fairly decent color. It certainly isn’t perfect, but it’s quick and easy and it’s good enough for around the house pictures of the family.

To get more precise color, it may be necessary to create a custom card specific to your lighting. In this case we would be making a blue card, rather than a gray card. Open up Photoshop, or any other image editing program and create some blue blocks of different shade. Print these out and experiment. When you find the right shade of blue that creates the best color for your indoor lighting, print this out on a large sheet, mount it to a cardboard back, and you have yourself a “blue” card.