Color on WebCam with background light

[Mercusio]

I may take my Rebel T7 back. On the default setting, and with background lighting, I end up looking like a Cheetoh. Is there an EASY way to correct this?

[rs-eos]

What white balance setting are you using?  And are your background lights magenta?  How about the other lights (e.g. overhead).  I'm wondering if you have mixed colors and different color temperatures in the lighting that may be confusing Auto White Balance.

[Mercusio]

I'm using all the white balance defaults. My goal was to change as little as possible from the defaults to make setup easy. Behind/above the camera, I have two light umbrellas with 60w natural light incandecent bulbs. The lights on the wall that you see behind the monitor and the poster are rear mounted LEDs. I have played with blues, yellows, and reds. purple-ish colors seem to do better for limited the orange skin tones. During this call, I switched the monitor off and the orange skin color went down quite a bit, so it may be some interference from the TV monitor, which is necessary for the studio so we can display info behind the presenter.

[Waddizzle]

Turn off the purple lights behind you.  Those cannot help.  If yo are using video lighting should not make a big difference.

[Mercusio]

That's not really a practical solution. There are plenty of broadcasts that use similar back lighting. We'd like to use any color we'd like and have a camera that doesn't orange the face.

It's interesting to me that turning off the monitor improved the color and turning off the LEDs did not. It seems that the issue is likely with the monitor.

The other answers on this thread have been helpful.

[rs-eos]

I'm not sure what natural light incandecent means.  If they are incandescent, the color temp will be around 3200K, so use the Tungsten setting on the camera in that case.

Edit: In searching on that phrase, I found some Philips bulbs that are coated blue.  But the specs don't publish the color temp.  I'm assuming they are trying to shift the warm tones closer to 5500K?

For the best setup with mixed lighting, do a custom white balance.

[Mercusio]

So, if it's higher than 3200 should we still try Tungsten? If so, is there a short primer somewhere how to do that?

Thanks for your help!

[Ray-uk]

A major difference can be made by just lowering color saturation, without altering white balance:

I don't do video so I'm not sure what options you have for saturation control.

[rs-eos]

No, only use the Tungsten preset if your lighting is traditional incandecent bulbs.  The Phlips web site didn't publish any color temperature values so one can only guess (maybe 5000K?)

I still stand by my advice though to just do a custom white balance.  Get a gray card, take a quick photo of it and set that image as a custom white balance.