Another Digital Photo Basic: White Balance

If you've ever noticed how your home's lighting can seem positively amber when you've just come in from outdoors, then you have a grasp of why white balance is important in digital photography.

All light is made of many different colors and it falls in a spectrum from deep blues to reds. (Think of a rainbow.) Often, there's a bias toward one color or another. For example, candlelight is yellow compared to tungston bulbs, which lean far more toward the warm (or red/yellow) end than sunlight. Light on a cloudy day is bluer than what you get in direct sun.

As the quality of the light changes, so does the appearance of colors, much as your clothing will look different when you are under some sort of colored light. White balance is the digital equivalent of indoor versus outdoor film. If you want a realistic representation of colors under different lighting conditions, then you need to take into account how the tint of the lighting affects what you see.

So you need to set the white balance of your camera to match the prevaling conditions. There is an automatic setting, but that can get confused by light reflected by colored surfaces, or it may be that you want to deliberately set the white balance to get a warmer or cooler sense to the image. Some cameras will let you take a reading from a white surface and then adjust the color perception so that the object actually comes out white, and not an amber or bluish color.

You will need to reconsider the white balance every time the light changes. That could mean moving indoors from outdoors, or visa versa, or even moving into a shaded area outside when you were in full sunlight. Just remember - if something goes wrong, this is a setting that you can adjust if you set your camera to save RAW images, and not JPEGs.