| White Balance | |||||||||
White Balance (WB) deals with the colour of light. |
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You may have taken photos at night indoors without flash and noticed how yellow the shots come out. That artificial light (sometimes called tungsten or incandescent) is in fact very yellow but because the human brain is so good at working out what colours really should be we barely notice the yellow colour of the light. If you are in the city at night and you see an office block that is lit by fleuro lights and there is one room lit by desk lamps you will see the yellow cast of the light in that room because you have a visual reference to compare it with. Viewed in isolation however the cast is not obvious. Set your camera's white balance to the symbol of the light globe and the white balance will be adjusted to get rid of the yellow cast. |
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Automatic White Balance |
Tungsten White Balance |
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| The above examples were shot under
“tungsten” light (standard household globes). Image 1 set to “Auto White Balance” (AWB) shows a strong yellow cast. The White Balance for Image 2 was set to “tungsten” (also called “incandescent”) to give a more natural colour balance. |
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Cloudy conditions are good for portrait photography as the illumination is soft and diffuse however there is more blue in the light (image 3). Set the WB to the cloud symbol to remove the blue cast (image 4). |
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Automatic White Balance |
"Cloudy" White Balance |
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| Similarly when working in the shade automatic white balance will often be fooled by the extra blue in the light. Set the white balance to the "Shade" position (The "house with shadow" symbol) for better colour. | |||||||||
| Automatic WB works o.k. when the conditions are easy but you are generally better to set white balance manually. | |||||||||
| Although you would usually match the symbol to the prevailing light conditions white balance can also be used for effect. For example the shade position gives warmer skin tones when used in normal daylight. | |||||||||
| A huge advantage of shooting RAW files is that the WB can be adjusted on the computer with no loss of quality (this is not the case with jpegs). | |||||||||
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