The Importance of White Balance

Why is white balance so important and why should I know about it?
White balance is important because it is the setting that determines how your camcorder or digital stills camera sees white. Electronics devices are stupid. They do not know what is supposed to be white in the picture unless you tell them. If the white balance setting is wrong, then your footage will appear too red, or worse too blue!

The White Balance setting compensates for the colour temperature of an environment. What on earth is colour temperature? Well, colour temperature is measured in Degrees Kelvin. This is named after the man who discovered that when carbon is heated up it becomes bluer in colour.

Hence indoor lights, such as those inside your living room, are a lower colour temperature (redder) than daylight (which is bluer).

In order to show colours correctly the camera has to take away certain colours. So if you are using the camera in your living room at night with the lights turned on, the camera has to take away the red tones in the picture. Otherwise your Auntie Dorothy will look like a roasted lobster! Conversely if you go outside on a nice sunny day the camera has to take away the blue tones so that your Auntie doesn’t look like a cold corpse!

But my camera handles this automatically!
Sure, most camcorders and digital stills cameras can handle white balance automatically. However if you want your footage to look more professional, or to get the best out of your camera you will always make an effort to set your camera white balance manually, or use one of the preset options.

What are white balance presets?
All camcorders and stills cameras have white balance presets. These usually come in the form of Daylight, Cloudy, Indoors, and occasionally Fluorescent.

By using these presets according to the environment you are in you will stop the camera varying the colour in your picture. You will also find that by using, say, the daylight preset to shoot a sunset you will bring out the colours that would often be lost had you left the camera on automatic. Who wants to see a washed out looking sunset or sunrise?!

So if I have presets, why do I need to white balance manually?
Because if you are in a room with indoor lighting and daylight coming through the windows the camera needs to be white balanced to a mix of these lighting types.

This is achieved by putting the camera into manual white balance mode and filling the frame with a white object that is being hit by both light sources, and then pressing the manual white balance switch or button.

But isn’t this just a pain to keep doing?
Not really. People would prefer to watch high quality video given the choice. By taking a bit of extra time with this you can improve your video over the usual home video fare.