Tip Time: Setting a Custom White Balance

One of the keys to getting a great picture is choosing the right white balance. Choose the right one and your colors appear vivid and make the picture pop. But choose the wrong white balance and your pictures look just downright weird. Blues take on a green tint, your skin becomes orangey, not very flattering at all.
Most modern cameras come with a few preset white balance options (i.e. cloudy, tungsten, fluorescent) that you can choose from depending on your lighting situation. But often these presets are not adequate and will require you to have to do some post-processing work to correct the colors. So in these situations, you need to know how to make your own white balance.
Now you could go and buy a $150 white balance tool called the expoDisc. Or you could go down to your local fast food chain and pick up a free fountain drink lid. Yep, you read that right. Try and find you a large, white opaque lid. Most fountain drinks use these type lids, so do most coffee cups.
So now that you have your drink lid, we can set our custom white balance. Grab your lid and your camera. Set your camera to Manual Focus. Now hold the lid about 6 inches away from your lens. It should look like a gray blur thru your viewfinder. Get your exposure set how you want and snap a picture. Check to make sure this image will work by checking the histogram by pressing the info button while viewing the image (for Canon users). It should be a giant hill somewhere around the 18% mark. Now go into your menu and choose 'Custom WB'. It will ask you to choose an image, choose the one we just made. Now go into your White Balance options where you can choose from the presets or a custom and choose the custom white balance.
There you go. Simple and painless and if done right will save you time in post-processing work.
That's it for now. Check back later for more tips.