How To Set White Balance On Your Camera

Because our eyes automatically adjust to the colour of the ambient light, we usually fail to notice how radically the light can change during the day, or when the light is artificial. Cameras, whether film or digital, are less sensitive than our eyes.

In days not long since gone, when all we had were film cameras, daylight film would reveal a yellow/orange cast when a shot was taken under indoor tungsten lighting. On the other hand, a blue cast would be obtained if a tungsten film was used in daylight. To get around these problems we had to select the appropriate film, or compensate with the necessary filter to get the right colour temperature or white balance, WB.

Nowadays we can easily set our digital cameras to capture the scene with the correct white balance setting. Although it is fairly straightforward to correct colour casts in post-processing, a digital camera usually offers up to four ways of adjusting the white balance before the shot is taken.

The Auto White Balance (AWB) setting attempts to calculate the colour temperature automatically. This is not 100 per cent reliable, but most of the time it will calculate the colour temperature correctly.

You can choose from a number of Preset WB settings, such as Shade, Daylight, Cloudy, Tungsten, Flash, and Fluorescent. These settings are very handy because they are quick to set and will be close to the correct adjustment.

There is also a choice of Custom WB. This is a manual way of setting the colour temperature and it lets you make a more exact compensation for the colour swing.

Lastly, on some cameras, you can actually input the colour temperature in degrees Kelvin. This method tends to be used in studio portrait photography where colour temperature meters are used.

Whether you have access to all or some of these features will depend on the type of digital camera that you have.

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