Why Are My Videos Yellowish?

If you are making your videos inside a house with common lightbulb illumination, your videos will probably have a yellowish tint. Our brain is amazing. It automatically makes this adjustment.

Our eyes see the yellowish warm illumination, but our brains automatically make the adjustment so that the colors look normal to us. If we walk into a kitchen with florescent lighting, our brains will automatically adjust to the bluish light.

Most camcorders today will automatically adjust to the different ambient colors. If you are outside, it will compensate for the bluish light. If you are inside, it will compensate for the orange tinted light. Older camcorders require you to make a manual adjustment.

If you have a newer, video camcorder, it will make these adjustments for you. You can improve your results by manually setting the color balance if you have one of the more advanced video camcorders.

What do you do? Point your camera at a white wall, or carry a white card with you. When you are under new lighting conditions, simply fill the view with the white card and press the color balance button. The camera will take a reading of the ambient conditions and render a properly light balanced video. You must remember to do this each time you move into a different light situation.

What do you do if you are in a mixed light situation? I don't have a good solution for this one.

Here is a familiar scenario to consider. You are making videos late in the afternoon in the living room. There are table lamps providing most of the illumination. There is a large bay window that is letting in great quantities of late afternoon light. That light is bluish in color. The lights from the incandescent lamps is orange. Your camcorder has to adjust to one of these light sources or the other, but it cannot adjust to both. Your video will be out of proper balance, and you will see that it is too bluish or too orangish. It won't be perfect.

Here is a good article that you can read on VideoProductionTips.com discussing white balancing and color temperature in producing video. Lorraine does a great job of explaining color temperature, and how to improve your videos by manually setting your white balance.

Remember, if you do manually set the color balance, you will have to set it each time you change your lighting location. To save you from messing up your videos, it might be better just to leave it on automatic white balance.