WHITE BALANCE
What is it and Why Should I Care?

Well, this is why...

Before digital photography, we didn't need to be concerned about cool light and warm light. We just needed to make sure there was enough light! But in digital photography, understanding the key factors that impact the quality of your pictures takes on new importance.

This is the one main reason why you may want to understand and use white balance -- to produce photographs with colors that are as accurate as possible.

Modern day digital cameras produce outstanding quality images using an electronic brain to duplicate colors as accurately as possible. Like most electronic brains, it operates according to certain pre-programmed logic.

Although this is its strength, there are also inherent weaknesses which are always going to be there. Difficult lighting situations are always going to produce less-than-ideal colors unless a human being compensates for these unique situations.

And how you compensate for it is by changing the setting on your camera's white balance. Have you ever noticed that some of your images have a blue, orange, yellow, or green tint (or cast) to them?

If you're like most people, you find this quite confusing because the scene looked quite normal to you when you took the picture. To the naked eye, all the colors were perfect. After the picture is taken however, the colors looked like someone put a colored transparency over them.

The reason for this effect is that different sources of light actually have a different temperature, which means that depending on the source of your light, the colors in your photograph will actually look slightly different.

For example, your typical incandescent light bulb has a yellowish cast while fluorescent lighting adds a bluish cast to photographs.

Don't start to panic. For the huge majority of all your photographs, colors will come out accurately without you doing anything other than keeping the white balance on "Automatic" (often designated as "AWB"), and taking the picture.

However, in extreme lighting situations, we don't want settings and calculations to be made "automatically." We need to make an adjustment based on our understanding of the unique lighting situation.

But, you might ask, how do we know when to make these adjustments, versus allowing the camera to make all the lighting decisions? That, is the $ Million question!

It is not easy to notice every time our eyes adjust to less-than-ideal lighting situations.

However, if we take a photograph (under less-than-ideal lighting situations) on AWB, our camera is not as smart as our brain and will therefore not produce accurate colors.

We need to tell the camera when there are extreme lighting situations so that it can make adjustments for unique lighting and the resultant colors.

Simply put, in cooler light (which might produce a blue cast), we need to tell our camera to warm things up; and the way we do this is by adjusting the white balance.

Different digital cameras make these balancing adjustments differently. The following are common white balance settings; but please check your own camera’s manual regarding the specifics of how your camera does it.

• Automatic - this is where the camera makes a best guess on a shot by shot basis. You’ll find it works in many situations but it’s worth venturing out of it for trickier lighting.

• Tungsten - usually symbolized with a little bulb, and is used for shooting INDOORS, especially under tungsten/incandescent/bulb lighting. It is meant to cool down the colors in photos.

• Fluorescent - compensates for the "cooler" temperature of fluorescent lights and will "warm up" your shots.

• Daylight/Sunny - "normal" outdoor setting on a bright day

• Cloudy - this setting generally warms things up a touch more than the "daylight" mode.

• Flash - the flash will often produce a "cool" light. This mode will warm up your pictures.

• Shade - when taking pictures in the shade, the light is generally cooler (bluer) than shooting in direct sunlight. Use this mode to warm things up a little.

Do not memorize all of the above descriptions. Only remember that adjusting your white balance setting based on the unique lighting situation will result in the most accurate colors.

When using your camera, note which icons are used for the different light adjustment settings. Know what they are for and then simply try to remember that when you change lighting conditions.

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