The benefits of having a diffusion panel on hand just keep coming…

In my Do-It-Yourself Light Box, I used Cracked Ice diffusing panels that are typically designed to cover overhead florescent lights as the outside panels of the light box frame. They served to diffuse the bright light sources I placed outside the light box, creating nice, even lighting within.

If you have leftover scraps from the diffusing panel after building the light box, they also are a good tool to set the custom white balance on your camera. Here’s how to do it.

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Nearly every light source has some sort of color cast to it, and this can wreck havoc with your digital photographs. Digital cameras have an automatic white balance mode that seeks to solve this problem, compensating for the color cast so your photographs look like they were taken under regular, neutral daylight. But this automatic mode is often inadaquate.

Custom white balance takes the automatic mode one step further. You shoot a sample frame of a neutral color and the camera adjusts the white balance according to the hues present in the frame. Typically, professional photographers have expensive white balance cards that they calibrate their digital camera against, but I’ve found the diffusing panel works just as well.

Find a scrap of the diffusing panel large enough to cover your lens. Set the lens to manual focus, hold the scrap in front of the lens, and shoot. Go to the custom white balance option on your digital camera and select the picture of the diffusing panel you just took. That’s all there is to it - your digital camera’s white balance will be calibrated to the lighting conditions in the room you are shooting in.

I’ve found the results from the diffusing panel white balance trick to work better than using paper or an index card. Let me know of any other ways you’ve found to calibrate your digital camera’s white balance.

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