White balance

Making white in a scene look white in a picture.

White balance is all about ensuring that colors appear natural looking in your pictures. White should look white; blue should look blue, and so on. This may sound silly to you. After all, if a color looks to you to be correct, then why wouldn't it appear correctly in your picture when you photograph it?

Our eyes adjust to different types of light, compensating for the effect that light has on colors. So, if the light from a blue sky adds a blue cast to your subject, our eyes try to see the subject as if it didn't have a blue cast, and usually succeed at doing so. We are used to seeing the subject as naturally-colored, so our brain makes the color shift adjustment for us. We are usually not even aware that this internal color-compensation happens for us.

But, the camera doesn't adjust unless we set it to do so. It "sees" colors exactly the way they are in any given light, and will capture the subject with the blue cast. When we look at a picture of the same scene photographed with a blue cast, we suddenly notice that it doesn't look natural; it seems too blue, or too green or red, depending on the color of the light that was falling on the subject. When people say "The camera doesn't lie," this is one instance where that saying is true.

When this occurs in a case where you may have forgotten to adjust your digital camera's white balance, all is not lost. You can usually use your image-editing software (such as Adobe Photoshop) to remove the color shift. Doing so can sometimes be difficult though, requiring a good deal of skill and time to achieve satisfactory results using an image-editing program. You are almost always better off to take your pictures with your camera already adjusted for proper white balance in the first place.

Photographers have been correcting for the color of the light falling on their subject since the early days of photography. It was and is quite common to filter light through colored "gels" located in front of lights, or to place corrective filters on or behind the lens to change the the color of the light before it reached the film. This method is still employed today by professionals and advanced amateurs when there are a variety of light sources in an effort to balance the overall light reaching the film or digital sensor, or sometimes to artificially color areas of a scene, as demonstrated by the images on the right.

One easily-understood example of using a filter to adjust the color of the light occurs when employing a warming filter, which is typically used to alter skin tones to make them look more pleasing.

Most digital cameras have a default setting or mode that automatically calibrates for white balance - the "auto white balance" setting. Those that permit you to manually adjust for white balance or that have a variety of white balance "presets" (see "Presets for white balance" below) afford you greater control, since the default setting does not always produce the best results in all lighting situations.

In order to achieve proper white balance using a camera's default mode for automatic white balancing, a digital camera will analyze a scene in an effort to determine areas that should be recorded as pure white. When those areas have been identified, the camera will adjust the overall scene's color balance so that the areas meant to be reproduced as white in the picture will be white, thereby also adjusting all the other colors in the scene using the same color shift values at the same time. Theoretically and more often than not, the overall scene will reproduce with accurate, natural colors. Where the camera's auto white balance can run into trouble, though, is in attempting to analyze a scene that has no white in it. The camera may then make a mistake and "decide" that another color is white when it may actually be a pale yellow or another light tone. The auto white balance will then attempt to make that color photograph as pure white when it is not, thereby negatively affecting the overall scene's color balance. This scenario is a prime example of when you would wish to over-ride your camera's auto white balance and choose a white balance setting that will more accurately represent the scene's natural colors.

Your digital camera's menu typically contains the different settings you can employ for adjusting white balance. Each camera may have a different means of doing so, and may even have different symbols (or icons) to identify its white balance mode. Your camera's manual is the best source to rely upon when you wish to adjust white balance.

Presets for white balance

Your camera may have settings that have already been programmed, based on specific color temperatures, to achieve proper or close-to-proper white balance under specific lighting conditions, called "presets". Typically, these might include settings for shooting under daylight with options for overcast or cloudy lighting, sunrise and sunset, bright sun or shade, fluorescent and tungsten lighting.

Presets, if your camera comes with them, may be accessible through the camera's menu button or via an icon that represents your camera's white balance options. We recommend you refer to your camera's manual for instructions.

When using presets, keep in mind that they can't be relied upon for absolutely accurate color rendition of a scene since they are set for a specific color temperature and the actual lighting for a scene can be somewhere within a range either side of that setting. It's a good bet, though, if you use a preset for shade, for example, that you will achieve a closer balance for a subject in shade than if you used another white balance setting, including auto white balance.

Manually setting white balance

White balance that has been manually determined has the advantage of being very accurate, providing you do it correctly. The good news is that it is easy to do, assuming, of course, that your camera has the capability of manual white balance.

What do you need? A pure white sheet of paper or stiff board. That's it. Place it in the same light that is illuminating your subject, and bring your camera close enough to fill the viewframe with it, without blocking the light that is falling on it. Now, select "Manual" from your camera's white balance menu. At the right moment, when your camera signals you to do so, trip the shutter to take a picture of the white sheet.

You have just "instructed" your camera, telling it what white looks like in the light that is illuminating it. Now, your camera can go to work, and will quickly adjust its white balance to suit the light in which you will be taking pictures. The job is done. It's that easy.

If the color of the light should change, which it can at sunset or when your subject moves into an area where the light striking it is different, you will need to recalibrate the white balance to continue to take pictures.

If you find that you are unhappy with the results because your colors don't look right, the odds are that the sheet you used was not really white, but may have been an off-white or a bluish white. Or, you may have allowed your shadow or your camera's shadow to fall on the sheet when you took your reading to calibrate white balance.

Manual calibration is the ultimate means of determining proper white balance, ensuring that the scene's colors will be recorded naturally and accurately under the light striking it.

Setting white balance by color temperature

There is another means of setting white balance, using a special light meter that reads color temperature, called, not surprisingly, a color temperature meter. Although such a meter can be used in natural light or artificial light that is found anywhere, this kind of meter is particularly useful in studio photography, where it is of great help in balancing mixed studio lighting, even with ambient lighting that might be included in the scene to be photographed. Your camera must have the capability to select color temperatures to use this method of calibrating white balance.

Experiment with different white balance settings

It can be fun and can produce interesting variations to try different white balance settings, some of which may actually look more pleasing to you or may even be complimentary to your subjects.

Some cameras permit you to bracket white balance settings. If yours has this capability, we suggest you use it every now and then to experiment with the different effects it produces. But, especially use it for crucial pictures that you may not be able to retake. That is what it is intended for. You may find that a white balance setting that you might not have otherwise chosen produces the most pleasing picture.