FAQ: What is white balance?

22Feb/120

White balance is the ability of the camera to adjust the warmth or coolness of the colors of your photo, depending on the quality of the light in the frame.

White balance is a quite important part of photography, but it's one that most of us do not use on our DSLR cameras. Still, it will be worth your time to educate yourself what white balance is and the way to properly use it. Then you will see a noticeable improvement in the color of your photographs.

White balance is adjusted in pictures so that it's possible to have the colors in your pictures as close to reality as you can. You may perhaps wonder why it's so essential to get the colors just right. This is because various types of light in pictures can give objects a different color than to the naked eye. For instance, some pictures can come out on film with a blue or orange cast in them. This is even though to your eye, these colors do not appear. This happens because the light source has a different color or temperature to it. For example, lighting by fluorescents will give the objects in the picture a bit of a bluish color. An incandescent bulb will put a little bit of yellow tinge into the images.

Our eyes don’t usually see this because our brains make the adjustment for us. But a digital camera lens does not have the brainpower to make such an correction without some help.

Your camera probably has its very own specific way to adjust your white balance. So, you will have to consult your manual to learn how to do it exactly.

However, typically, the white balance settings you'll find on your camera include the following:

•   Automatic: The SLR usually takes its best guess on which white balancing will work best. Works fine for many shooting situations, however, you may need to experiment in difficult lighting situations.
•   Tungsten: This is for shooting shots indoors and will tone down the colors in your photos.
•   Fluorescent: This will recompense for the cooler light of these bulbs and will give more warmth to your colors
•   Flash: The camera flash can be a cold dose of light, so your camera will add warmth to the image here.

You will normally have very good outcomes using the white balance settings above. However, you also can adjust white balance manually if necessary. What you can do is take one shot, and say, you are getting a slightly yellowish cast to your indoor shot of a row of books on a shelf. You have incandescent bulbs lighting the room. Hold up a white sheet of paper and show the camera what ‘white’ is in this scenario and then reshoot. You'll then get a photo with much of that yellow cast removed.