8 things you might not know about your Sony Alpha DSLR … Part IV

Like most DSLR cameras, the Sony A200 has automatic white balance (AWB), a few preset white balance (e.g. tungsten, cloudy and so on) and the ability to set the KELVIN temperature (I guess you can call this the manual mode).  However, the Sony A200 has this nice feature, called the Custom White Balance.

Custom White Balance

In the AWB, the camera will generally use the 18% gray rule [link] to get the overall colour temperature right.  If you take a picture of a completely white paper in the AWB mode, it will probably turn out slightly grayish (of course, the auto-focus will also not work as it has no patterns to catch on to).  So, sometimes we want to be exact in our colour representation, so how do we know what to set it to?

The custom white balance works in such a method;  firstly use the FN button …

Go to the White Balance menu,

You will be greeted with the following menu, scroll right to the bottom to the “custom” part. (The image below was obtained from somewhere on the net and unfortunately I did not remember where, so I can’t acknowledge their work).

Get a blank white piece of paper, put it under the main light source (or just any place where it can get the surrounding’s colour temperature) and set the custom white balance by depressing the shutter button.  This basically tells the camera that what it is seeing is white and please set the colour temperature accordingly.

In simple words, remove the guessing of Kelvin temperature and get the camera to do it for you!

To be continued … Part V