What is White Balance?

Do you ever wonder…what is white bal­ance? And how do I set it? We’ve talked all about get­ting tack-sharp pho­tos, and how to choose your aper­ture, but what about white bal­ance? We have a fan­tas­tic group over at the Learn Pho­tog­ra­phy with Dena Face­book group, and one mem­ber who is always there to help is our mod­er­a­tor Berit! You’ve prob­a­bly seen Berit’s amaz­ing pho­tos in the group-if you don’t know what I’m talk­ing about, make sure you go check them out-and may have even received some of her invalu­able advice.

Well, today she’s going to dive into a ques­tion we’ve seen a lot recently…What is white bal­ance? How do I know what to set? And what hap­pens when I set my white bal­ance? So with­out fur­ther ado, I will turn it over to Berit…

How to Choose the Correct White Balance…

So, I often see the ques­tion, “what is the right white bal­ance set­ting for the gold­en hour?” This should be easy to answer, I thought. If the sun is still up, and there no clouds, ‘day­light’ should be the right set­ting. If it’s cloudy, then cloudy should be the right set­ting. Wrong.

To find the right set­ting in each sit­u­a­tion, it is help­ful to know what hap­pens in your cam­era when you change the white balance.

Our human eye, in co-oper­a­tion with our brain, is so much more sophis­ti­cat­ed than our cam­era. When we look at a white sheet of paper on a desk, lit by a desk lamp only, the paper looks white. How­ev­er, the cam­era sen­sor records exact­ly the incom­ing light from the desk lamp that, on a col­or scale from blue to yel­low, is very much on the yel­low side (called ‘col­or tem­per­a­ture,’ mea­sured in Kelvin).

When you use your cam­era to take a pic­ture of this paper and want the result to be white, the light bal­ance has to be shift­ed to the blue side. That is what hap­pens when you set the white bal­ance – it shifts the col­or tem­per­a­ture so that the col­ors in your pic­ture look gen­uine to your eye.

The white bal­ance set­tings of ‘day­light,’ ‘shade,’ ‘cloudy,’ ‘tung­sten,’ and ‘flu­o­res­cent’ are pre-set­tings that help you to get a pic­ture straight out of your cam­era. The col­ors are true, and not every­thing bathed in yel­low or — even bet­ter — all the faces in your group pho­to turned to a weird shade of pur­ple (indoors with neon light).

AWB stands for auto­mat­ic white bal­ance. Like every auto­mat­ic set­ting, it MAY work, espe­cial­ly in stan­dard sit­u­a­tions, but you will nev­er know what it does.

Here are some test series to visu­al­ize the shift in the light tem­per­a­ture (set­tings on each photo)

Part­ly cloudy day with the sun peek­ing through:

Indoor sit­u­a­tion (my very tidy desk) with day­light (over­cast) com­ing through the windows

Same desk, shades closed and only the desk lamp on

In any oth­er sit­u­a­tion, to deter­mine the white bal­ance, you have to look around first: Where does your light come from? Is it day­light, or is it a lamp? If it is day­light, is it fil­tered (through the clouds, for exam­ple) or reflect­ed (as in the shade)? That gives you an idea, where to start.

Com­ing back to the sit­u­a­tion ‘gold­en hour- the time six­ty to nine­ty min­utes before sun­set on a sun­ny day. It is a beau­ti­ful time for por­traits as the sun is low; just over the hori­zon; and pro­vides a warm, slight­ly yel­low light. Set­ting the white bal­ance to ‘day­light’ would equal­ize this warmth, and you would lose this spe­cial atmos­phere. Set­ting it to ‘cloudy’ enhances the warm light and gives your mod­el the gold­en shine you were aim­ing for when choos­ing this time of the day.

When you can­not decide what set­ting would be the best – try dif­fer­ent ones. It’s easy, and it is just one or two more clicks.