Updated: September 10, 2026
You light an interview in a Miami office. The key is a daylight balanced LED, the window behind is real daylight, the ceiling is full of fluorescent tubes and there is a warm practical lamp in the shot. The camera can only be white balanced to one of those. Everything else will shift.
Mixed colour temperature is the most common lighting problem in corporate interiors, and it is far easier to solve on location than in the grade.
The scale, briefly
Colour temperature is measured in kelvin. Lower numbers are warmer, higher numbers are cooler, which is the reverse of how the words feel.
Common reference points: household tungsten around 2700 to 3200K, older studio tungsten fixtures at 3200K, direct midday sunlight around 5500K, overcast daylight higher still, and shade or open sky higher again. LED sources vary enormously by model and setting.
The eye adapts to all of this continuously and barely notices. The sensor does not adapt at all. That gap is why a room that looks fine to you renders as one warm area and one blue area on camera.
Green and magenta, the axis people forget
Kelvin describes only the blue to orange axis. There is a second axis, green to magenta, and fluorescent and cheap LED sources often sit noticeably green on it.
This is why an interview can be correctly white balanced and still look subtly wrong: skin tones go sallow because of a green cast the kelvin setting cannot address. Correcting it means adding magenta, either with a gel on the source, a camera adjustment where available, or by turning the offending fixture off.
A colour meter reads both axes and removes the guesswork. Where there is no meter, a white card and a careful look at skin tones on a calibrated monitor gets you most of the way. Our note on reading your monitoring tools covers what the scopes will and will not tell you.
Four ways out of a mixed room
Kill what you can. The fastest fix is switching off overhead fluorescents. Nine times out of ten the room looks better lit by your own sources plus daylight, and the interview gains contrast it did not have. Ask permission, and find the right switch during the scout rather than the shoot.
Match your lights to the dominant source. If the room is defined by a large window, run daylight balanced fixtures and let the window be the anchor. If you are in a windowless conference room lit by tungsten practicals, match tungsten. Fighting the dominant source rarely wins.
Gel the sources. Correction gels shift a fixture to a different temperature: blue toned gels convert tungsten towards daylight, orange toned gels convert daylight towards tungsten, and minus green gels correct fluorescent. On bi-colour LEDs the same result comes from a dial, which is why they have become standard for location work.
Use the mismatch deliberately. A warm practical in a cool frame reads as intentional when it is motivated by something visible in the shot. The difference between a mistake and a look is whether the audience can see where the light comes from.
The window problem specifically
Miami offices have a lot of glass, and daylight through it is both the best light available and the hardest to control. It changes intensity through the day, it changes colour as clouds pass, and it is far brighter than your fixtures.
Options in order of preference: use it as the key and supplement with matched fill; control it with neutral density gel on the glass or with blinds; or block it entirely and light the scene yourself. What does not work is ignoring it and hoping the grade fixes an exposure difference of several stops.
Setting white balance in a mixed room
Balance for the light on your subject's face, not for the room. The background can sit warm or cool and read as atmosphere; a face with a colour cast reads as an error.
Set a custom white balance from a grey card held where the subject sits, under the lighting you will actually use. Presets are a starting point, not an answer, and the daylight preset in particular is a generalisation about a light source that changes all afternoon.
If you are shooting log, the white balance metadata still matters. Log recording preserves latitude, it does not neutralise a bad balance, and correcting a large kelvin error in post costs quality that a ten second card would have preserved.
Record a few seconds of a grey card at the head of each setup. It costs nothing and gives the colourist a reference that is worth more than a written note.
Multi-camera consistency
The moment there are two cameras, matching them becomes its own task. Same white balance setting, same picture profile, same gamma, entered manually rather than trusting auto on either body.
Shoot the same grey card on both cameras at the start. When the edit cuts between angles, that reference is what makes the two sit together without a fight in the grade. Our note on lighting modifiers for interviews covers the quality of light alongside its colour.
Working with a crew that solves it on set
Colour problems are cheap to fix on location and expensive to fix afterwards. Turning off a bank of fluorescents takes a minute. Separating a green cast from skin tones in the grade takes far longer and never fully succeeds.
When we light an interview in Miami, the scout includes finding the light switches, identifying which sources can be killed, and deciding what the dominant temperature will be before any fixture comes out of a case. That is the difference between a clean grade and a rescue.
If you have a shoot in an office, hotel or venue with awkward lighting, send us photos of the room and we will tell you what we would do with it. More on our approach is on the about page, further technical notes are on the blog, and you can reach us through the contact page.
Frequently asked questions
Can colour problems be fixed in post?
Partly. A modest overall shift corrects well. Two different colour temperatures in one frame, or a green cast sitting on skin tones, are far harder and rarely come back cleanly.
Should I turn off the office lights?
Usually yes, if you can. Overhead fluorescents typically add a green cast and flat top light that does no favours to an interview. Ask before flipping anything, and check nobody else in the space needs them.
Do I still need gels with bi-colour LEDs?
For kelvin adjustment, often not. For green and magenta correction, sometimes yes, since not every fixture offers a full plus and minus green adjustment.
What white balance should I use outdoors in Miami?
Set a custom balance from a grey card rather than relying on a preset. Bright sun, cloud and shade differ enough that a single preset will be wrong for at least one of them across a day.