You can now get a fader filter to adjust your scene’s colour temperature
Jun 27, 2016
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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This is a strange one, and I’m not quite sure how I feel about it yet. The new ICELAVA Warm-to-Cold fader is a new filter which offers a stepless level of white balance adjustment from 2900K to 6300K.
It works similarly to a circular polariser or variable neutral density filter. You screw it onto your lens, and then the front rotates to change the effect seen through your lens, but I’m really not getting the point.
It strikes me very much as a solution looking for a problem. If we’re shooting digital, we can already change the colour temperature to known values in order to get correct, warm or cool looks to our images. Whether shooting stills or video, we can set that in the camera before or, if we’re shooting raw, we can set it in post.
So, having a filter over the lens that sets the white balance to some unknown number that we have to guess in post just doesn’t make any sense at all to me.
Maybe, perhaps if you’re shooting on actual colour film, having a filter that could let you shoot tungsten film outdoors in daylight, or shoot daylight film inside using lights of a different colour temperature might possibly useful, but I think most film shooters would either just load the film appropriate for the lighting, or they’re shooting black & white where it doesn’t make a difference.
Possibly there’s some reason I haven’t thought of why this filter needs to exist, but there might be a simple reason why nobody’s ever made one before, and it may be the obvious one.
The filter is available in 58mm, 67mm, 72mm, 77mm and 88mm sizes, although it can only be imported from Taiwan at the moment.
With a cost of $130, I think I’ll take a pass on this one, especially given the typo shown in the video above. If they can’t even get the writing correct on a filter for a promotional video, I wonder how reliable the quality control may be on the filter itself.
What do you think? Can you think of a reason why this filter might be useful? What advantage it may offer over simply shifting your white balance in the camera? Let us know in the comments.
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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15 responses to “You can now get a fader filter to adjust your scene’s colour temperature”
It’s not even April!
Ha!! Best comment so far, right here. Have to agree with the article, solution looking for a problem.
I love new photo toys and I love to get things in camera, but I gotta say I can think of a couple plug-ins I have used many times with this exact bi-color gradient filter. And you obviously have lots of flexibiltiy on the back end. I can see it being useful for video, to do some interesting user controlled, color shifting effects, but that’s about it.
That’s it, though, it’s not even a gradient. It’s just a solid colour shift across the whole image.
I guess finding the WB in camera is just too difficult for some…
If you are shooting in location that has strong color cast, like underwater you can control the whitebalance just setting in camera as the camera’s color channel dynamic range is exceeded. I need this.
If you are shooting in strong color cast location, lik underwater, then you can’t just set the whitebalance from the camera, as the camera’s color channel dynamic range is not enough. I need this, but ND4 is not helping underwater.
Will my photos be better if I wear sunglasses while I shoot on an overcast day?
ROFLMAO!!
I could imagine that it’s useful for video. But I’m not into video making, so that’s just a guess.
How did they get John Travolta to do that video? And to dress like his Pulp Fiction character… Love it.
Anh C Do KC Tran Guys i think we need 1 of these filters
I came across this effect a while back by accident and its been long enough ago that I can’t remember exactly how I got there but it involved little more than turning the polarizers around and shooting through the wrong side. I can’t remember if it was just one or both the filters that needed turned and if they were both circular but I know if anyone ever gets the need to create this useless effect there’s absolutely no reason to run out and drop $130 on a pre-made unit. Just experiment with what you’ve got on hand.
Use case:
Transitioning from a warmer room to a cooler room in video and trying to maintain color neutrality?
Indoor to outdoor, rotating the filter while stepping down??
Accentuating a sunset? What about blending it with a timelapse?
There are always use cases – lol.
Yes, you could use something like this to fake a sunset, causing the light to transition from cold to warm.