All About White Balance

 One way of manipulating the photos you take, that is not often utilized to its full extent is that of white balance. While we generally simply allow the camera to do its own thing in regards to white balance, there are significant advantages to understand white balance and learning how to manipulate it.
The first step taking more control of your photos is understanding what white balance is: the process wherein the camera adjusts the shades of the whites that appear in the photograph taken, so that they match or differ from the shades of white in the subject of the photo. This requires the camera or photographer to recognize ranges in color temperatures in the subject in order to match or differ from the specific shades of white. By measuring the "color temperature" (measured in kelvin) the camera attempts to match the shades of white in the photograph taken to match the temperature of the "true whites" in the subject.


The next step in the process is understanding the different settings of white balance. Typically, white balance can be set under your camera's manual exposure menu settings. Under the white balance menu, you can choose one of several options to set your white balance. Common settings (layman's terms for specific color temperature measurements) are, "Auto White Balance", "Daylight", "Shade", "Cloudy", "Tungsten", "White Fluorescent", "Flash", and "Custom". Keep in mind different makes and models of cameras may have different settings. Each of these options, except for Auto and Custom, are controlled light temperatures that are set according to average temperatures of various light sources in order to correct an image for natural-looking light. When set to auto, the camera will automatically change the white balance what its programming thinks it should be based on what is being viewed through the lens. When set to Custom, the camera will adopt the white balance from an image that you specify on your memory card.


Next, choosing how to set your white balance. There are multiple ways to adjust the white balance in your photos. One of those is through the automatic feature on the camera. This method has several pros and cons.  There are several positives of using the automatic setting. DSLR cameras are pretty advanced now, and especially if you are a novice to photography the camera may be able to adjust the whites in your photos better than you can. If the light is changing over your photo taking session the camera can automatically adjust for that, allowing you to just focus on your subject(s). However there are cons. Although the auto feature is very smart, it is not completely intuitive concerning color temperature. While you may be taking a picture in warm light, the camera may adjust the whites to have a much cooler feel. Hindering your desired effect. You may want to change the whites to be cooler than they really are, however on automatic you have no way to do that. Automatic also does not create automatic completely accurate color balance of the photo being taken. So if you want total and complete control over your photographs colors, you may want to think about using manual white balance.





The biggest advantage to manually setting your white balance is the consistence across all photographs you take with that specified white balance. No matter what your light source is, the camera will take the photograph with that one white balance. This is useful when you are taking multiple photographs of the same thing—instead of minutely trying to adjust the white balance to the same light temperature in post-processing, the white balance is already uniform. However, manual white balance can also be problematic. Forgetting to change the white balance before shooting a different photograph under different lighting conditions can lead your image to be irreparably washed out at worst, or too blue or too yellow/orange at best. Misinterpreting what kind of light you are shooting with can also lead to this problem. If you choose to shoot with manually adjusted white balance, take care to be aware of what the white balance is set to.

Here is an example of white balance gone wrong:

photo by Mykaela Rogers

The cause of the problem in this photo stemmed from forgetting to check the manually set white balance to make sure it was set correctly. The white balance was set on Tungsten, which caused the camera to interpret the scene incorrectly, because the scene (a sunrise) is not lit by a Tungsten lightbulb. This washed out the image data and made what is still viewable too blue.

The same image after post-processing:

photo by Mykaela Rogers

Even after attempting to fix the image during post-processing, the light was so badly clipped that the raw image data didn't contain most of the color or clouds in the sky. Post-processing was able to restore some of the image data, but not enough to salvage a decent photograph.