Find the correct white balance setting for your lights, calculate a mixed-source average, and see how scene appearance changes at different camera WB settings. Works for photography, video, and cinema.
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What “Mired” Means
Color temperature in Kelvin is not a linear scale for how a filter or gel actually shifts color — mireds (micro reciprocal degrees, 1,000,000 ÷ Kelvin) are. A fixed amount of color-correction gel shifts color by roughly the same number of mireds regardless of the starting color temperature, which is why lighting gels are rated in mired shift rather than a flat Kelvin number — a gel that corrects 3200K tungsten to 5500K daylight needs a specific mired shift that would correct any other light source by that same amount, not necessarily to the same final Kelvin value.
Mixed lighting in practice. When a scene has two light sources at different color temperatures — daylight through a window plus tungsten room lights, for example — no single camera white balance setting will make both look neutral at once. Gelling one source to match the other (correcting the tungsten to daylight, or vice versa) is usually a cleaner fix than splitting the difference with the camera’s white balance alone.