In this lesson: Explore how to manage and correct color with white balance adjustments

Using your camera’s white balance adjustment allows you to get images in which objects that are white when viewed with the naked eye are also rendered white in your photo. Using the right white balance takes the color temperature of the scene into account and helps remove unwanted color casts. White balance can also be used creatively to manipulate colors more effectively.

The White Balance (WB) adjustment on your camera adjusts for differences in the color temperature of the lighting in a scene. Various light sources cause the colors reflected to our eyes and the camera sensor to shift, due to the presence or absence of particular wavelengths of light emitted from the source(s). These color shifts are often most noticeable in the rendition of pure whites in an image.

Because the sensor in your camera can’t adjust to these changing light conditions, software in the camera is used to correct the color rendition for an image based on the value of the lighting. The correction is based on correctly rendering whites in the scene, hence the name for this adjustment. Most DSLRs allow you to select WB correction manually, choose from preset parameters or let the camera’s software make the choice based on incoming light.

Manual white balance selection based on color temperature requires a good working knowledge of color temperatures and/or a gray card or similar reference. To make the process easier, DSLRs allow you to choose one of several pre-programmed settings based on common lighting conditions. These settings can be used to ensure whites remain so in your images. For example, look at the whites of the boy’s eyes in the sample image. Note how they are pure white, with no color cast. This is the purpose of using your camera’s white balance adjustments.

Note: Before discussing the presets, it’s important to know that colors near the UV end of the spectrum, such as blue, are commonly referred to as “cool,” while colors toward the opposite end of the spectrum, i.e. reds, are referred to “warm.” Here, color temperature refers to how the colors look, not an actual temperature.

The following are the most common presets:

• Auto: The camera analyzes the light entering the lens and adjusts the WB based on algorithms in the software. This setting has a limited range and can often yield unexpected results.
• Custom: This setting allows you to take an image of a reference (such as a neutral gray card) and then adjust the resulting image to find the correct WB setting, which can then be used for subsequent images.
• Daylight: This setting is intended for shooting under bright sunlight and can be considered the most “normal” mode.
• Cloudy: As the name implies, this setting compensates for cloudy conditions, by warming the colors slightly, as seen in the sample landscape image of the mountains and stream.
• Shade: This setting compensates for shady outdoor lighting conditions by warming the colors even more.
• Fluorescent: Standard fluorescent lighting tends to be much cooler than daylight. This setting heavily warms the colors.
• Tungsten: Incandescent (bulb) lighting tends to be much warmer than daylight. This setting compensates by cooling the colors.
• Flash: While bare flash lighting is close to daylight in intensity, it tends to be cooler in color. This setting warms the colors slightly.

Many DSLRs also offer a “Kelvin” setting, which allows you to enter the color temperature of the lighting in degrees K. It’s also worth noting that White Balance settings can be used to deliberately create color shifts when a particular effect is desired. For example, when taking a photo of a sunset, like the example image of the mountains in the autumn included here, you can use the shade setting to purposefully warm up the already warm colors of the sunset.

Challenge Activities

Using the lists below, capture and view the different types images, checking off each respective image as you go. This exercise should help familiarize you with the effects of white balance adjustment by giving you an opportunity to see the differences side-by-side for the same subjects.

Activity 1: Set WB Mode to Daylight and shoot a scene of your choice in the following conditions:

• Dawn or Sunset
• Noon
• Open shade

Activity 2: Set WB Mode to Tungsten and shoot in the following conditions:

•  Dawn or Sunset
•  Noon
•  Open shade

Activity 3: Set WB Mode to Cloudy and shoot in the following conditions:

•  Dawn or Sunset
•  Noon
•  Open shade

Once all the images are taken, compare each to determine how the selected white balance modes perform in varying lighting situations. For example, examine how the Daylight WB setting makes the image look at dawn as compared to at noon or under open shade.