Understanding White Balance in Digital Photography

While I’m in fashion show taking pictures A friend of mine ask me why my shots has a different colors from what they got. I simply answers I’m using different white balance from him. and tell to him that I’m always using different white balance while taking a pictures. He ask me why I’m changing my white balance? I simply told to him because of the lighting situations. By the way what is white balance and what they can do in our photos?

If you come from the world of films, you may remember using filters to correct for incandescent or fluorescent lighting. Most people don’t bother and their indoors pictures invariably come out with a yellow/orange or bluish cast. In the digital world, these correction filters are no longer necessary, replaced by a feature found in most — even the entry-level — digital cameras called, “White Balance.”

What is white balance? It all boils down to the concept of color temperature. Color temperature is a way of measuring the quality of a light source. It is based on the ratio of the amount of blue light to the amount of red light, and the green light is ignored. The unit for measuring this ratio is in degree Kelvin (K). A light with higher color temperature (i.e., larger Kelvin value) has “more” blue lights than a light with lower color temperature (i.e., smaller Kelvin value). Thus, a cooler (resp., warmer) light has a higher (resp., lower) color temperature.

Color Temperature (Kelvin) Light Source
1000-2000 K                          Candlelight
2500-3500 K                          Tungsten Bulb (household variety)
3000-4000 K                          Sunrise/Sunset (clear sky)
4000-5000 K          Fluorescent Lamps
5000-5500 K                      Electronic Flash
5000-6500 K                          Daylight with Clear Sky (sun overhead)
6500-8000 K                          Moderately Overcast Sky
9000-10000 K          Shade or Heavily Overcast Sky

The description and symbol for the above white balances are just rough estimates for the actual lighting they work best under. In fact, cloudy could be used in place of daylight depending on the time of day, elevation, or degree of haziness. In general, if you image appears too cool on your LCD screen preview (regardless of the setting), you can quickly increase the color temperature by selecting a symbol further down on the list above. If the image is still too cool (or warm if going the other direction), you can resort to manually entering a temperature in the Kelvin setting.

For most of new in digital photography, Auto WB is fine and does a pretty good job in diverse situations, outdoors and indoors.

But for those who are not happy with the colour cast of your picture, choose one of the preset WB settings of your camera.

If this still does not give you what you want, consider manually setting the white balance by using a white card or sheet of paper (or white T-Shirt, etc.) please refer to your camera manual on how to use it.

And, for ultimate control over white balance, consider shooting in RAW file format, and adjust in post-processing.

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