How White Balance Affects Your Image

This is something I’ve struggled a lot with. White balance refers to a setting on your camera which allows you to get rid of ugly color casts. You may have noticed that when you take pictures inside, they sometimes look yellowish. That is because your camera reads the color differently than our eyes. Your eyes would see things as they really are. Your camera takes in all the different types of light hitting your subject as well as the colors that they cast. Did you know the color of your walls can affect your white balance? The good news is that you can change your white balance. Most of the time, using auto white balance outdoors will do just fine. When you are inside, it gets a little trickier. There are a bunch of different dials on your white balance setting. Here are some basic ones.

AWB – Auto White Balance – your camera makes its best guess depending on the scene. Cameras today do a pretty good job on AWB in an outdoor setting. If you are shooting in RAW (an image format which does very little processing so all of the original data is present), you can tweak your white balance in post processing (when you edit with software like Photoshop or Lightroom). If you are shooting in JPG, it’s a lot harder to fix problem areas because JPG images are compressed and and some of the data gets lost. We’ll dive deeper into that next week.

Daylight – This is a pretty general setting so you may get similar results to Auto White Balance.

Shade – Shady areas can be cool or blueish so this setting will warm up your image as well.

Cloudy – will also add warmth to your images.

Tungsten – this refers to bulb lighting which can have a yellow cast. This setting will make your images cooler or blueish.

Fluorescent – this setting will warm up your images and counteract a cooler scene.

You may also have a setting for flash and Kelvin. Kelvin is a great way to practice and see how the temperature of light affects your image. The lower your kelvin temperature, the warmer your picture will be and the higher you set your temperature the cooler your picture will be.

Your assignment is to play around with white balance settings this weekend. See what happens to your image when you change it. Get to know your camera settings better and you will have more control over how your images will look!

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